from Hacker News

Netscape ISP Homepage

by fireeyed on 4/8/21, 12:29 AM with 117 comments

• by xiii1408 on 4/8/21, 3:11 AM

  My grandmom legit still uses Netscape dial-up as her ISP. She lives in a very rural county in Tennessee, and there are no DSL, cable, or fiber options. Her house is unfortunately also down in a valley, so there's no cell phone reception, although there's reasonable 5G service if you walk up to the top of a nearby hill. Perhaps Skylink will be an option soon, although not yet.

  My parents bought her a Kindle a while back, which is difficult to use without WiFi internet access, although it doesn't require much bandwidth. I actually made her a dial-up WiFi router using an RPi, USB WiFi and dial-up modem adapters so that she can create a WiFi network off of her dial-up connection to download e-books. My friends helped me use the GPIO to set up a nice, user-friendly button to connect and disconnect the dial-up connection, as well as a notification light to signal whether the dial-up is connected, connecting, or off. (Remember you can't leave dial-up on all the time, since you want to receive or place calls using your landline sometimes.)

  Actually, the hardest part of the whole thing was getting the dial-up connection working with an open-source Linux client instead of Netscape's proprietary Windows client. I ended up having to use VirtualBox and some Linux FIFO's to listen in on what the proprietary windows client was doing when connecting. In case anyone else happens to come upon this problem: the proprietary Netscape client lowercases the password before sending it over the wire. :P

• by AceJohnny2 on 4/8/21, 1:47 AM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Internet_Ser...

  > Netscape ISP is a dial-up Internet service once offered at US$9.95 per month. The company serves web pages in a compressed format to increase effective speeds up to 1300 kbit/s (average 500 kbit/s). The Internet service provider is now run by Verizon under the Netscape brand. The low-cost ISP was officially launched on January 8, 2004. Its main competitor is NetZero. Netscape ISP is no longer actively marketed, but for a time its advertising was aimed at a younger demographic, e.g., college students, and people just out of school, as an affordable way to gain access to the Internet.

• by jandrese on 4/8/21, 2:23 AM

  Some people are going to call the design dated, but to me that kind of layout is timeless. Just the facts and it has good information density.

  But LOL that the "Maps" link goes to mapquest.com. In other news Mapquest still exist.

• by kivlad on 4/8/21, 2:20 AM

  https://www.compuserve.com is the same thing.

  Oath/Verizon is keeping these sites on some kind of life support to this day.

• by statenjason on 4/8/21, 2:03 AM

  That loaded fast.

  Also, seeing the network request for background gradients takes me back to an era of CSS I don't miss. Anyone remember the hacks for drop shadows and rounded corners?

• by coolreader18 on 4/8/21, 2:32 AM

  I feel like the first character of this title should be lowercased, URLs traditionally are and I thought it said "LSP" instead of "ISP"

• by bartread on 4/8/21, 11:20 AM

  Man, that logo hit me right in the nostalgia. Nice that they haven't modernised it actually.

  Also, that homepage is incredibly lightweight by today's standards: 125KB with uBlock Origin enabled and still "only" 390KB with it disabled. Granted I'm looking at it on a fibre connection, but for me it loads almost instantly.

  I imagine, if you're still using the Netscape dial-up internet access service over a 56Kb modem, it's going to be a rather different experience: probably 20 - 30 seconds to load with an adblocker switched on, and maybe up to a couple of minutes without one. I used to get stroppy with pages >50KB back when I still used a modem because of the time they took to load.

  Still, a very beautiful and nostalgic homepage. Props to Verizon for not screwing it up.

• by buro9 on 4/8/21, 7:18 AM

  Inaccessible without visiting guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers

  DNS ad-blocking shows up a fair number of these methods because the sites become unavailable (not a bad thing)

  Latest fetch: https://web.archive.org/web/20210408062043/https://isp.netsc...

  Earliest fetch (2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20040205013205/http://www.isp.ne...

• by cjamesd on 4/8/21, 4:24 AM

  I wonder if all the traffic from HN every few years justifies the continued existence of these sites to the owners (unknowingly, not sure how granular they might be in their traffic analysis). Kind of like patronage at a museum.

• by jtchang on 4/8/21, 1:59 AM

  Holy those pages load fast. Design feels slightly dated but the speed is fantastic.

• by buildbuildbuild on 4/8/21, 1:53 AM

  Surprising to see recent headlines. Who here is still maintaining this. I am so nostalgic and intrigued.

• by taylorfinley on 4/8/21, 3:23 AM

  Today I learned you can still order an AOL CD: https://help.aol.com/articles/Ordering-an-AOL-CD-ROM

• by aphextron on 4/8/21, 3:16 AM

  Rememeber how great the web used to be?

• by virtue3 on 4/8/21, 3:16 AM

  This site loaded so freaking fast it blew my mind.

• by WarOnPrivacy on 4/8/21, 2:07 AM

  I like that sportsball and celebs is off to the side - to differentiate it from news.

• by fatjokes on 4/8/21, 2:46 PM

  Man, look at that clean, readable HTML source! Growing up View Source was how I learned the bulk of my HTML/Javascript. Miss those days...

• by ficklepickle on 4/8/21, 2:58 AM

  I was curious if I could find anything out about their stack. Turns out they are using something called Apache Traffic Server[0].

  > Formerly a commercial product, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation

  [0] http://trafficserver.apache.org/

• by addajones on 4/8/21, 3:31 AM

  I miss my old EarthLink.net email address. . Where can we go to get these old emails? Do any still exist?

• by Grieving on 4/8/21, 2:34 PM

  When I got into software development around 2013-2014, only dialup and satellite internet were available in my area, and nobody had really nice computers (mine was an old, secondhand netbook). As a result, I can't overstate how much I appreciate informational sites consisting of 'plain' Web 1.0 HTML/CSS. They loaded fast, didn't lag when doing something as simple as scrolling, and didn't break when the connection dropped. They were also easier to archive with wget, which was very important to me given the instability of my connection.

  Thankfully that was the heyday of jekyll/octopress, so there were a lot of accessible dev blogs.

• by neandrake on 4/8/21, 1:59 AM

  Aside from being a little small, the layout of this page is very easy on my eyes and also holds my attention compared to most news sites I come across. It also loads and displays content really well without requiring external javascript.

• by bigiain on 4/8/21, 2:52 AM

  I was sorely disappointed to see that was laid out with divs and css, not tables...

• by ghewgill on 4/8/21, 9:26 AM

  The best thing about this news page is the complete lack of clickbait headlines. Some of the headlines are so good that you don't even have to read the article!

• by gerjomarty on 4/8/21, 8:24 AM

  I was wondering what everyone was talking about when a huge AOL cookie consent page came up for me first, requiring me to reject consent from a bunch of tracking cookies.

  If this site doesn't actually track anything (and I stress I haven't checked), I guess they've just put the consent modal on everything they own just to be safe?

  I guess this is because I'm based in Europe, given the majority of comments here.

• by athenot on 4/8/21, 1:14 PM

  Seeing that Netscape logo is a blast from the past. Out of curiosity I stripped out the subdomain to see where netscape.com goes these days, and it redirected me to aol.com. Ouch, that hurts!

  Not just for nostalgic reasons but also as a parallel with how the open web these days is being co-opted by Google / Facebook.

• by akoster on 4/8/21, 7:00 AM

  I might just have to switch now that Fry’s ISP is no more https://web.archive.org/web/20210224065426/https://www.frys....

• by spiritplumber on 4/8/21, 8:21 AM

  This is what the front page of a portal should look like. It looks good, loads instantly, doesn't ask you inane questions about cookies or bombard you with ads...

  Perfect.

• by ChrisArchitect on 4/8/21, 3:32 AM

  ha, someone posted in the discussion about this years ago in 2016 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12978762) that it was just like http://compuserve.com also. Amazing that one is up also

• by thought_alarm on 4/8/21, 2:08 AM

  "Designed for AOL Netscape 6"

• by whalesalad on 4/8/21, 2:06 AM

  I remember using the first version of the Netscape browser that had this aesthetic and used this page.

• by human on 4/8/21, 2:35 AM

  Looking at this design triggers so much nostalgia. Reminds me of my early days learning html.

• by gremlinsinc on 4/8/21, 3:23 AM

  Politically I lean left, so my take from my view is the articles so far I've read are almost 90s like as they're much more just the facts and less spin. (Of course that's cause it's mostly just a wrapper around reuters and ap news feeds)

  It's kind of refreshing.

  I usually read news from news, politics, conservative, and socialist, and libertarian subs on reddit to get an idea how ppl think about what's going on from different angles. Usually just read the headlines and the comments. Plus hacker news.

  I'm thinking when I just want news this might be a good portal to just get middle of the road news without opinions or spin in an old school layout that doesn't hurt my adhd brain.

• by King-Aaron on 4/8/21, 6:24 AM

  aaah, the good old days of 980px wide websites.