from Hacker News

A collection of 88x31 pixel web buttons from the 1990s and 2000s

by jakobdabo on 11/29/22, 9:04 PM with 151 comments

  • by 101008 on 11/29/22, 9:31 PM

    Oh, top nostalgia from the 1990s/2000s online. These buttons meant a lot to me. I think I said this on some of my old comments, but I learnt programming because I built a very popular website about a topic/fandom that I was very into back then.

    There were a lot of websites about that, but only a few were really popular. The structure was very basic: header, left sidebar with links, centered content, and right sidebar with small chatbox, polls, random quotes, and affiliates. The affiliates was simply that: a link to another website in exchange of a link to your website. They started using text links but they usually evolved to 88x31 buttons, first simply JPG then animated GIFs.

    Being in the affiliates section of the top websites (again, only for this subject) was the best. I remember spent hours and hours (translated into days adn weeks) designing my buttons in MS Paint (yeah, pixel by pixel) so I could convince the webmaster of the popular website to include mine, because a lot of the time they decided based n the button and not the website itself.

    Anyway, sorry for the long rant (maybe younger people will learn something today), but as a lot of people I miss the old internet and I could talk hours about this!

  • by lanbanger on 11/29/22, 9:35 PM

    Great site, but is it finished? If not, perhaps it would benefit from a yellow and black flashing "Under Construction" banner.

  • by teddyh on 11/29/22, 10:48 PM

    > These buttons are an historic example of advertising in the earlier days of the World Wide Web.

    These were not “advertisements” as we now know the term. No, these buttons were mostly put up by users themselves, on their own web pages. Yes, ordinary users used to have their own web pages, mostly without paid advertisements. These buttons, when they linked to commercial products, were unpaid product endorsements.

  • by xxswagmasterxx on 11/29/22, 9:39 PM

    Here are even more of them: http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/

  • by tyingq on 11/29/22, 10:32 PM

    You can also coax google image search into finding these with the "imagesize:" search directive.

    https://www.google.com/search?q=imagesize%3A88x31&tbm=isch&s...

  • by a_shovel on 11/29/22, 10:04 PM

    Part of what gets me about relics from the Geocities era, apart from the eye-catching and charmingly amateurish maximalist aesthetic, is that personal webpages were a space in a way a Twitter or Facebook profile just can't be. A profile page where you can't change the background, font, font size, font color, sidebar content, overall layout, etc, is to a webpage as a prison cell is to a home.

    Still, webpages can't compete with the shareability and "virality" of social media by default; it's what made them popular. The simplicity of use is also a prerequisite; there's millions of people who can't write a line of HTML or CSS, and 99% of them never will. I sometimes daydream about some service that will somehow combine the best of both worlds. Total customization with viral sharability, and without requiring technical skill. Maybe something like that's already been made; maybe we can learn something from why it failed.

  • by tumultco on 11/29/22, 9:22 PM

    If you're on a retina display, I recommend adding this CSS so it uses nearest-neighbor interpolation for the scaling:

      img {
    image-rendering: pixelated !important;
  }

  • by codazoda on 11/29/22, 9:50 PM

    > NET@DDRESS - Free Email for Life

    I thought for sure "life" would be over by now but www.netaddress.com still looks like a 1990's website. There's some info about payments so I dunno if it stayed free, but it's crazy that it looks like you can still login if you have an account.

  • by alex_suzuki on 11/29/22, 9:27 PM

    It’s funny how seeing those two numbers (88x31) together instantly triggered some really deep-rooted memories.

    I wish I kept I copy of “Sky’s Obervation Deck”, my crappy little Geocities page about Star Wars (I think…), proudly part of some random web ring, and surely with its share of <blink>.

  • by kazinator on 11/30/22, 2:53 AM

  • by replwoacause on 11/29/22, 9:23 PM

    I miss these earlier days when the internet was just being born. What a mess we have on our hands now.

  • by alphabet9000 on 11/29/22, 10:13 PM

    what a coincidence, i made 2 88x31 buttons a couple of hours ago

    http://jollo.org/defcon1.gif

    http://jollo.org/letsnotencrypt.gif

  • by techdragon on 11/30/22, 6:52 AM

    Reminds me of a recent pondering of mine… there used to be all these “powered by Apache”, “powered by PHP” buttons that were very similar to the type of buttons in the site here. But they were vertically shorter, and you often saw them used as a block to let people know some stuff about the website, sort of like “User bars” (think that’s the right search term) for stuff in a forum signature.

    But despite having at some point bookmarked a similar site/page that had hundreds of these little images… age and link rot and fragile bookmark services of old have long since lost the link , and now I don’t even remember what to search for to even find such little images, there was at least a few generally accepted nouns for them … perhaps the collective HN wisdom remembers these little images and can help me find them or just want to share more early internet stories about these kinds of images.

  • by meindnoch on 11/29/22, 10:11 PM

    Anyone remembers the forum sig subculture from the early 00s? (sig as in signature)

  • by greatNespresso on 11/29/22, 9:19 PM

    And it loads pretty fast compared to 2022 websites

  • by dkga on 11/29/22, 10:51 PM

    Saudades triggered for Netscape, MacOS that I couldn’t afford, and visiting websites that people actually made.

  • by SergeAx on 11/29/22, 10:41 PM

    I was always wondering about weird dimension choice. Why on Earth they are 88*31? Okay, 88 is divisible by 8 and 8 is bits per byte and we can bit-map one row to 11 bytes maybe, using gif paletted compression. But why 31? Why not 32, which is at least a power of 2?

  • by system2 on 11/29/22, 9:22 PM

    Many Quake logos. Ironically I am still playing the game on a daily basis.

  • by thisisjasononhn on 11/29/22, 11:08 PM

    I love these! :D It's so fun looking through all the relics of the old web, and the buttons still relevant to current era internet.

    I made one for hetzner: https://jason.nabein.me/buttons/hoh-88.png

    and one for Runbox email: https://jason.nabein.me/buttons/runbox-88x31.png

    Although I should change Hetzner to Netcup now

  • by elpocko on 11/29/22, 9:57 PM

    I was online during that era but "88x31" does not ring any bells. Is it significant at all or just some arbitrary size? What about the number of animation frames? 88x31x10?

  • by pfoof on 11/29/22, 9:31 PM

    Also, anyone knows the origins of this particular resolution?

  • by insane_dreamer on 11/29/22, 9:31 PM

    Fun! I miss the electronic sounds that would play with some of the warez ones; not that I ever clicked on any of those, of course ;)

  • by KyleBerezin on 11/29/22, 11:31 PM

    "Campaign against Frames" A quick google search lead to this https://tintara.tripod.com/FramesSuck.html It is interesting to see what are now basic html features used to be contested.

  • by fbn79 on 11/29/22, 9:27 PM

    FREE was the magic word. Java was already hated (applet I think). WinRAR was still the most wanted

  • by Daegalus on 11/29/22, 11:30 PM

    Man, this brings back memories, along with webrings, guestbooks, etc. I even made a few for my own sites, long lost, I don't even remember what my sites were, was just a young teenager. But boy do I remember that I made a few of these.

  • by brazzy on 11/29/22, 10:19 PM

    Irfanview.

    Still around and under active development.

    Still has the same icon.

    Still the best image viewer / converter / kitchensink.

  • by chuckhoupt on 11/29/22, 10:47 PM

    Just last week I updated one of those for Retina/HDPI:

    https://houptlab.org/img/made-on-a-mac-20221117.png

  • by smoldesu on 11/29/22, 9:52 PM

    The DeviantArt stamp collection is also fun to scroll through: https://bungle.online/@DeviantArtStamps

  • by ben_w on 11/30/22, 11:21 AM

    I was oblivious how much hate there was for Netscape at the time. Possibly because I was on a mac and all the memes were anti-Gates (some things don't change) and anti-Microsoft.

  • by gennarro on 11/30/22, 3:56 AM

    Bring me back to my days of obsessing over the design of k10k.net!

  • by ghetzel on 11/29/22, 10:42 PM

    There's no succinct way to capture how "The Future" it felt when RealPlayer rounded those corners...like we finally arrived somewhere.

  • by wildpeaks on 11/29/22, 11:18 PM

    Oh nice, there is one from Blaxxun (the OG metaverse).

  • by par on 11/29/22, 10:08 PM

    It's like going through my childhood photo album!

  • by keithnz on 11/29/22, 10:04 PM

  • by heleninboodler on 11/29/22, 10:03 PM

    I love how many cliched riffs on the "Netscape NOW!" button there are. This page should be called "Web Buttons NOW!"

  • by notRobot on 11/29/22, 9:42 PM

    Ooh, I also have my own personal collection of these. I'll email the site admin any that they don't already have.

  • by Waterluvian on 11/29/22, 10:21 PM

    Oh wow I forgot about those.

    Why 88x31 other than consistency?

  • by aidos on 11/29/22, 9:28 PM

    My god that brings back a lot of memories.

  • by _HMCB_ on 11/29/22, 10:38 PM

    All those buttons and it still doesn’t make my browser choke like many of today’s single web pages do.

  • by timemachine on 11/30/22, 4:26 AM

    Memory lane. As a web dev from when this was the fad, many of these buttons are very recognizable

  • by swayvil on 11/29/22, 10:47 PM

    It's Buff! And Ballsey!

    (It's from a cyberpunk movie of a similar vintage. I forget the title.)

    I mean it sincerely. My eyes!

  • by unglaublich on 11/29/22, 10:25 PM

    Nice, but lacking a visitor counter!

  • by twic on 11/29/22, 11:10 PM

    I had not thought about the Schwa Corporation in a long time.

  • by shepherdjerred on 11/30/22, 1:50 AM

    Oh I'm definitely putting some of these on my website

  • by jbverschoor on 11/29/22, 9:24 PM

    But it in VR and it's almost like a chillout session.

  • by rconti on 11/29/22, 9:42 PM

    Wow, even has one from a company I worked for (iPass).

  • by glauber on 11/29/22, 11:39 PM

    Made with Notepad

  • by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on 11/29/22, 10:28 PM

    Looks like only Amazon's logo survived)

  • by marstall on 11/29/22, 9:22 PM

    "Best Viewed with a Budgie" ???

  • by meowmeowmoo on 11/30/22, 1:49 AM

    “Now” appears in a huge number of these…

  • by omega3 on 11/29/22, 9:43 PM

    Penguin Computing is larger than 88x31.

  • by flippinburgers on 11/30/22, 3:04 PM

    Man I love this. And I miss this.

  • by pcdoodle on 11/30/22, 6:52 PM

    Neat! Thanks for sharing!

  • by Aeolun on 11/30/22, 12:43 AM

    Why 88x31 anyway?

  • by graderjs on 11/29/22, 11:09 PM

    Why.

    Aren’t.

    They.

    Clickable?!

  • by lasermike026 on 11/29/22, 10:11 PM

    Oh my word, I almost threw up.

  • by artursapek on 11/29/22, 9:29 PM

    comfy