I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…
Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!
Yahoo PIpes was ahead of its time. Here’s a nostalgic retrospective by Glenn Fleishman.
Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.
The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.
There are some tasty designs in this archive from Sainbury’s.
A stylesheet for when you’re nostalgic for the old Mac OS.
I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.
Flash, from the very beginning, was a transitional technology. It was a language that compiled into a binary executable. This made it consistent and performant, but was in conflict with how most of the web works. It was designed for a desktop world which wasn’t compatible with the emerging mobile web. Perhaps most importantly, it was developed by a single company. This allowed it to evolve more quickly for awhile, but goes against the very spirit of the entire internet. Long-term, we never want single companies — no matter who they may be — controlling the very building blocks of the web.
Notes on the old internet, its design and frontend.
Well, this is a fun bit of CSS. Instantly transform a web page into a blast from the past (1998, to be precise).
- Wrong: web workers will take over the world
- Wrong: Safari is the new IE
- Right: developer experience is trumping user experience
- Right: I’m better off without a Twitter account
- Right: the cost of small modules
- Mixed: progressive enhancement isn’t dead, but it smells funny
Maybe I should do one of these.
This fun little film gives me all the feels for Battlezone …but then watching the excellent “making of” video really made me appreciate the love and attention to detail that went into this.
I’m not sure why but I genuinely love this Windows 95 style interface for Instagram coded up by Gabrielle Wee.
This is how Graham proposed to Linzi …and you can try it out for yourself.
(I must’ve got something in my eye when I got to the end of the level. Weird.)
Seb is going to be closing out the Brighton Digital Festival with a bang.
Seb unravels all the geeky details about how your favourite retro gadgets work, including Nintendo light guns, Casio keyboards and the cathode ray tube televisions that once dominated our living rooms.
It’s going to be like Seb: The Musical …with lasers.
Dave is making a nifty in-browser game that you can play by yourself or in co-operative mode. If your device has a gyroscope, you can use that to aim. Very cool!
(And it looks like it’s all set to become a progressive web app once it’s running on HTTPS.)
A lovely little native app:
The world’s most advanced camera for your mini pocket computer.
View source for added nostalgia/flashbacks.
Oh, and RTFM.
Over 700 screenshots of ZX Spectrum games, captured by Jason Scott. Some of these bring back memories.
Yaili is documenting the process of retrofitting ubuntu.com to be responsive. I’ll be avidly reading each post in this series.
I would love to have a ticker-tape machine for my tweets.
