People keep saying the web was all text in 1995, but I remember graphics

I mean, I see this a lot, that the early web was just grey pages and text. But I was there on a 14.4k modem in '95, and sites like The Spot and the original MTV site had graphics, backgrounds, even animated GIFs. It was slow, sure, but it wasn't just text. I think people forget about the whole 'Under Construction' banner era with those spinning icons. Does anyone else have a specific early graphic site they remember, like maybe the Space Jam page?

2 comments

2 Comments

iris4411d ago

Yeah, the graphics were totally there, but I think people mix up the timeline sometimes. The Space Jam site was actually late 1996, not the early 90s web. By then, Netscape had added more support for tables and images, so it was a step up from the truly sparse pages in like '93 or '94. It's a good example of that mid-90s shift, but the real bare-bones, mostly-text experience was just a couple years before that.

perez.christopher2d ago

You mentioned the Space Jam page, and my buddy still talks about waiting an hour for it to load on his parents' computer. He says the graphics were there, just in tiny, pixelated chunks you had to watch build line by line. That was the real early web experience, not just blank pages.