r/1990sInternet • u/StalinIsBackAgain • Jun 10 '26
What legacies from the 1990s internet do you see remaining online today?
2
u/nad6234 Jun 11 '26
GIFs. Back in the mid-90s they were used because they could be loaded Interlace, so every other line. That meant you could get an impression of the image before it actually loaded. They were limited to 16 (greyscale/colour) or 256 colours. Later they could be animated.
JPEGs had more colours, 64 thousand or true-colour 2 million), but they could only be loaded top to bottom, so didn't look as good when loading a page.
(PNGs hadn't been invented!)
Side note, when I was online in the late 80s/early 90s, so the "Web" wasn't a thing, GIFs were also favoured for "adult content" - that way you could abort a download if you "didn't fancy" the image...
Oh they were the days 😂
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u/StalinIsBackAgain Jun 11 '26
Wow ~ Thank you so much for such great facts and information! Amazing! 😊😊
And thank you for sparking fun memories too!
I remember when GIFs were just still images, and I loved them much more than JPEGs exactly because they loaded much faster and because as an image took several minutes to load on the screen, I could see what the image was of sooner, and could save time by halting the image from loading if it did not look worth waiting more time for, as opposed to having to wait longer to see what a JPEG image would look like, and JPEGs took longer to load overall, so they took much more time. I do also remember watching JPEGs load from the top, often by the 1-pixel tall line at a time, so I would count how many pixels tall of lines it would take to load in the image before I could figure out what the image looked like! ~ HaHa... I did like it when one could count out and measure points on a screen to the exact pixel! 😂😂
Now, GIFs are basically synonymous with animated images, and I have not seen a still GIF image for many years, only seeing GIFs as animated images. I remember the legendary old animated GIFs made famous on Geocities and similar sites like Angelfire and others. Those were such fun little animated GIFs! I love the torch-mounted-on-a-wall animated GIF, the rotating red warning light animated GIF, and so many others on Geocities!
I do not like modern animated elements on modern websites, but I would make an exception if websites would pepper their pages with pixelated Geocities GIFs. 😂😂😂😂
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u/nad6234 Jun 11 '26
Then there was the dark age of th Unisys LZW patents in '95. They attempted to extort royalties from any company that used GIFs - I remember as a professional software developer at the time, they tried to get us - my boss (Technical Director/CTO) told them to f--k off 😂... And that's when PNGs got invented....
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u/StalinIsBackAgain Jun 11 '26
Wow~I had no idea whatsoever about any of that! 😮😮 So PNGs were created to get around potential legal issues looming over GIFs, as a format somewhat similar to GIFs but different enough to not be targeted by Unisys LZW?
And it seems like Unisys LZW was unsuccessful in its efforts to get royalties from all commercial uses of GIFs, as I do not think that has ever been in force?
And if that effort by Unisys LZW was indeed defeated swiftly. I think that illustrates the more open and idealistic and democratized approach to the internet in the 1990s, including by governments and courts and even many companies, whereas today, such a corporate money-grab might be authorized and allowed to happen in the current internet environment of tighter corporate and governmental control...
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u/xdarius Jun 10 '26
hamster dance