I have a soft spot for late '90s tech, that's when I came of age. My family and I used Macs, so when I'm feeling nostalgic I will often fire up SheepShaver, BasiliskII, or Mini vMac to play some...
I have a soft spot for late '90s tech, that's when I came of age. My family and I used Macs, so when I'm feeling nostalgic I will often fire up SheepShaver, BasiliskII, or Mini vMac to play some of my favorite childhood games.
The web is a different beast though, there's no true rewind button for that. On the client side, as shown in this video, most websites simply won't run at all due to modern TLS standards. This is absolutely a good thing for security, and I won't be convinced that any site should be available without HTTPS in 2022. But between that, and the current state of JS+CSS heavy sites (and current specs for those) it's just not possible to enjoy today's web on vintage systems. I've used Classilla a bit on OS 9, which is the closest I've come to a compromise, but it's not without its troubles and the developer finally stopped supporting it last year. Its usefulness will degrade quickly without updates.
On the server side, I have a huge appreciation for archival efforts, but link rot is real. Even archived sites are often missing assets or entire pages or sections. Untold volumes of information that were once hosted online are now lost to the ages. Obviously the current web is information-rich as well, but it's really the quirky, niche, labor-of-love sites of the '90s I'm referring to, that were obscure then and are forgotten now. There's no substitute for most the early oddball web in today's consolidated, corporate web.
I have a soft spot for late '90s tech, that's when I came of age. My family and I used Macs, so when I'm feeling nostalgic I will often fire up SheepShaver, BasiliskII, or Mini vMac to play some of my favorite childhood games.
The web is a different beast though, there's no true rewind button for that. On the client side, as shown in this video, most websites simply won't run at all due to modern TLS standards. This is absolutely a good thing for security, and I won't be convinced that any site should be available without HTTPS in 2022. But between that, and the current state of JS+CSS heavy sites (and current specs for those) it's just not possible to enjoy today's web on vintage systems. I've used Classilla a bit on OS 9, which is the closest I've come to a compromise, but it's not without its troubles and the developer finally stopped supporting it last year. Its usefulness will degrade quickly without updates.
On the server side, I have a huge appreciation for archival efforts, but link rot is real. Even archived sites are often missing assets or entire pages or sections. Untold volumes of information that were once hosted online are now lost to the ages. Obviously the current web is information-rich as well, but it's really the quirky, niche, labor-of-love sites of the '90s I'm referring to, that were obscure then and are forgotten now. There's no substitute for most the early oddball web in today's consolidated, corporate web.
You don't need to tell me about link rot. I started writing professionally in 1992. Almost nothing of my work is still online.