Web 1.0
The Under Construction sign, the dancing baby, the spinning globe. The GIF becomes the visual vernacular of GeoCities and the early consumer web.
Part of GIfs
12 moments in this segment.
- — The Under Construction Sign. The canonical animated UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign, the universal placeholder that decorated half the personal homepages of the late 1990s. Place: Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, every personal homepage of the decade Figures: anonymous · copied without attribution · embedded in millions of pages The animated UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign emerges sometime in 1994-1995, no single author credited, as the universal placeholder for an unfinished section of a personal homepage. The canonical version: orange-and-black diagonal hazard stripes as a banner, the word UNDER CONSTRUCTION in bold sans, often accompanied by a small animated gopher in a hard hat swinging a shovel, or a flashing yellow police light, or a JCB-style digger with a rotating cab. Variants proliferate within months. There is a Geocities-blue version. A NASCAR version. A pink-glitter version for the Hollywood neighborhood. A tiny 88x31 BUTTON version for sidebars. None of the versions credits a creator. The GIF travels through right-click-save-as for years before anyone notices nobody knows who drew it. Video: A scrolling timelapse through hundreds of preserved GeoCities pages. The under-construction sign appears so often it functions as a sample rate.
- — GeoCities Launches. The GeoCities branding banner served from geocities.com itself, the suburb-themed Web 1.0 city that gave amateurs a home. Place: Beverly Hills Internet, Beverly Hills, California Figures: David Bohnett, co-founder · John Rezner, co-founder Beverly Hills Internet, a small Los Angeles ISP, launches a free-hosting product called GeoCities on 15 November 1994. The organizing metaphor is geographic: signups pick a NEIGHBORHOOD (Hollywood for entertainment, SiliconValley for tech, Athens for philosophy, Tokyo for anime, RodeoDrive for shopping) and receive a street address inside it. Two megabytes of disk, an FTP account, no charge. By 1997 the company drops the Beverly Hills Internet name, rebrands as GeoCities, and crosses one million HOMESTEADERS. The neighborhoods will be quietly retired in 1999 in favor of flat URLs, but the early naming convention geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/4242 survives in millions of inbound links and is the reason every Wayback capture of the era reads like an address book of the imaginary. Video: A retrospective on the neighborhood model, the homesteader boom, and the Yahoo collapse, with screen-captures of original 1996-era pages.
- — The Dancing Baby. Ron Lussier's animated GIF of Baby Cha-Cha, ripped from the Kinetix sample file and emailed into the first mass viral loop. Place: Kinetix Character Studio demo plug-in, 3D Studio Max Figures: Michael Girard and Robert Lurye, creators of the Biped plug-in · Ron Lussier, who shared the rendered AVI · LucasArts artists who converted it to GIF Kinetix releases Character Studio, a Biped-animation plug-in for 3D Studio Max. The sample file: a baby (model: Cha-Cha-Cha Baby) doing a side-step shuffle. The file ships as an AVI inside the plug-in's example folder. Ron Lussier at LucasArts emails the AVI to friends; someone converts it to GIF; the GIF is small enough to forward without questions. By winter 1996 it is on every other web page that allows animated images. It is the first viral GIF — an image that spreads across the consumer internet faster than any prior animation could, because the GIF requires no plugin and the browser will autoplay it the moment the page renders. Video: The Character Studio sample rig, set to Hooked on a Feeling, the way it actually shipped on screensavers and chain emails before Ally McBeal caught it.
- — The Animated Cursor Trail. A GeoCities-era cursor accessory GIF, the kind that trailed sparkles, hearts, or fairy dust behind the mouse pointer. Place: JavaScript hobbyist tutorials, Dynamic Drive, Geocities scripting archives Figures: anonymous JS hobbyists · copied through view-source · DHTML community Somewhere in 1996, a JavaScript hobbyist posts a snippet that attaches a series of absolutely-positioned tiny GIFs to the document body and updates their coordinates on every mousemove event, each one trailing the cursor by a longer delay. STARS. SPARKLES. TINY HEARTS. PUMPKINS in October. A flock of bats around Halloween. The effect is called the CURSOR TRAIL and within eighteen months it is on hundreds of thousands of personal pages. Distribution is entirely view-source. Visitor sees the trail, hits View Source, copies the script and the GIFs, pastes both into their own HEAD tag. The original author of the canonical snippet is unknown; Dynamic Drive (a tutorial site) hosts the most-copied version by 1998 with a credit line that itself credits an earlier anonymous post.
- — Webmonkey GIF Tutorials. An animated WebMonkey mascot pulled from a hobbyist GeoCities page, paying homage to Wired's how-to-build-a-website mascot. Place: Webmonkey, a division of Wired Digital, San Francisco Figures: Jeffrey Veen, founding editor · Taylor and Hodgman editorial team · uncredited freelance authors Webmonkey launches in 1996 as Wired Digital's how-to site for building things on the web. The GIF tutorials are among its most-trafficked content from day one. The topics: HOW TO OPTIMIZE PALETTES (down to 32 or 16 colors without obvious banding). DITHER VERSUS NO-DITHER (the Floyd-Steinberg pattern versus the flat-color look). TRANSPARENT BACKGROUNDS (the index-color trick with the fringing problem). BUILDING ANIMATIONS in GIFBuilder (Mac, free) or Animation Shop (Windows, bundled with Paint Shop Pro). These are the first reference tutorials for the format that anyone could find via Lycos or Alta Vista. Before Webmonkey, GIF-making knowledge was scattered across Usenet posts, README files inside shareware, and the cryptic help systems of the editors themselves. Webmonkey aggregates it into a stack of articles that a high-schooler with a 28.8k modem and an interest could read on a Sunday afternoon and emerge equipped to make a passable banner ad.
- — Flash Arrives. Animated typography, the move Flash was built for. FutureSplash becomes Macromedia Flash 1.0. Place: Macromedia, San Francisco Figures: Jonathan Gay, lead developer · Charlie Jackson and Michelle Welsh, FutureWave co-founders · Macromedia, acquirer FutureWave Software releases FutureSplash Animator in 1995, a vector-animation tool for the web aimed at users who wanted smaller files than GIF for line-art animation. Macromedia acquires FutureWave on 6 November 1996 and rebrands the product as MACROMEDIA FLASH 1.0. The browser plugin (FutureSplash Player, renamed Flash Player) is bundled with Internet Explorer 4 in 1997, which solves the install-base problem in one stroke. Flash's pitch against GIF: vector graphics scale without pixelation, line-art animation files are dramatically smaller, the format is scriptable via ActionScript (1.0 in 2000, 2.0 in 2003, 3.0 in 2006), audio and video stream in the same container, interactivity is native. The pitch is technically correct on every axis. It still does not kill the GIF. Video: A walk through FutureSplash Animator months before Macromedia bought it in December 1996 and renamed it Flash 1.0.
- — Every Image Under 5K. An 846-byte animated blinkie, the kind of sub-1K GIF the dial-up era depended on. The whole file is smaller than this caption block. Place: web-page-optimization culture · DEV.COM tutorials · Webmonkey audience Figures: uncredited optimization-blog authors · the 28.8K modem · the BANDWIDTH BUDGET as discipline By 1997 the consumer-web optimization norm has settled at roughly THIRTY KILOBYTES TOTAL PAGE WEIGHT for a homepage that should load in under ten seconds on a 28.8K modem. With HTML, MIDI, and one or two background images already eating half the budget, individual interface GIFs (buttons, dividers, navigation arrows, mascots) are squeezed to UNDER 5K each. Many to under 1K. The aesthetic discipline this produces is severe. GIFs of the period: 8-bit indexed-color palettes (often hand-reduced to 32 or 16 colors). Harsh dithering, because Floyd-Steinberg gives better small-file compression than flat fills on most images. Hard-edged anti-aliasing approximations because true anti-aliasing requires palette space the budget doesn't allow. Tile-friendly backgrounds because a 64x64 tile is cheaper than a single full-screen image. The whole TEXTURE of the 1997 web is the texture of bandwidth constraint.
- — The Hampster Dance. Deidre LaCarte's tiled animated hamsters from the original Hampster Dance, four loops repeating in unison to a sped-up Whistle-Stop sample. Place: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/7156, then hampsterdance.com Figures: Deidre LaCarte, art student at the University of British Columbia · her sister and a friend, who were in a competition with her to see whose Geocities page would get the most hits Deidre LaCarte, 24, a art student at Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, BC, builds a Geocities page in tribute to her pet hamster Hampton Hampster. The page consists of four rows of small animated GIFs of hamsters dancing, each row stepping in a different rhythm, against a tiled background, with a looping 9-second slow-tempo midi sample (Whistle Stop from the 1973 Disney film Robin Hood, played at speed). She uploads it in August 1997. By March 1999 it has six hundred thousand visitors a week. It is, on every dimension a critic might evaluate, ridiculous. It is also one of the first sites whose only purpose is to be enjoyed as a GIF-and-sound assemblage. The page is the joke; there is no further content. Video: Deidre LaCarte's page rendered in period-accurate Netscape 4. Four GIFs, tiled, MIDI auto-playing, the original conditions of the infection.
- — Blinkies. A demonstration of the blinkie aesthetic, the strobing animated badge form that LiveJournal, Xanga, and tween homepage culture turned into currency. Place: personal homepages · message-board signatures · Neopets userlookups (2000+) Figures: anonymous artists · pixel-art communities · the BLINKIE EXCHANGE sites The BLINKIE is a small animated GIF, canonical dimensions roughly 50x15 pixels (some at 88x31, the same size as a web button), bearing two or three words of looping color-shift text. I LOVE UNICORNS. VISIT MY SITE. BEST VIEWED IN NETSCAPE 4. PROUD ARIES. OBSESSED WITH BACKSTREET BOYS. The text colors cycle through three or four palettes per second. The background is often a tiled glitter pattern or a static gradient. By 1999 there are blinkie EXCHANGE sites whose entire purpose is to host thousands of blinkies categorized by topic, free for any visitor to right-click and embed on their own page. The exchange model anticipates by a decade the reaction-GIF directories of the 2010s. The format is tiny, the bandwidth cost is negligible, the social function is enormous.
- — Yahoo Buys GeoCities. Sunglasses drop. Deal with it. Yahoo pays $3.57B for GeoCities at the absolute top of the bubble. Place: Yahoo HQ, Sunnyvale, California Figures: Tim Koogle, Yahoo CEO · David Bohnett, GeoCities CEO · Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo founders Yahoo announces on 28 January 1999 that it will acquire GeoCities (see [[geocities-launches-1994]]) for approximately $3.57 billion in an all-stock transaction. It is the LARGEST WEB ACQUISITION in history to that point. Yahoo stock, then trading at a split-adjusted peak, makes the math arithmetically credible; the dotcom correction eighteen months later will not. GeoCities at the time of acquisition: 4.6 million homesteaders, the third most-visited site on the web behind AOL and Yahoo's own properties, an estimated 38 million pages by year's end. The GIF library that comes with the acquisition is, on a per-byte basis, the largest single archive of animated images on the consumer internet. Nobody at Yahoo, then or later, has a clear plan for what to do with it. Video: Bohnett tells Brian McCullough how the neighborhoods grew, why the IPO and Yahoo deal happened, and what got broken after.
- — Burn All GIFs Day. This is fine. House on fire. The patent protest spirit, illustrated by KC Green's dog half a decade later. Place: the open web · the FreeGIF coalition · Free Software Foundation backing Figures: Jeff Bryner, lead organizer · Bruce Perens, FSF support · the PNG working group Burn All GIFs Day is announced for 5 November 1999 by a coalition organized around the FreeGIF mailing list, with backing from the Free Software Foundation and the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) working group. The protest target: the Unisys LZW patent (see [[lzw-patent-1985]]) and the enforcement campaign Unisys began in 1994 (see [[unisys-enforcement-1994]] in Era II). Participating sites pledge to, on that one day, replace every GIF on their pages with a PNG and post an explanation of the patent thicket. The FSF posts a long technical brief. Slashdot covers the protest twice. Roughly several thousand sites participate, mostly small personal pages plus a handful of larger sites like the GNU project. Major commercial sites do not participate.
- — The Pets.com Sock Puppet. An animated Pets.com banner GIF preserved on GeoCities, a relic of the sock-puppet brand that became the headstone of the dot-com bust. Place: Pets.com homepage · TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles Figures: Julie Wainwright, Pets.com CEO · Lee Clow, TBWA creative director · Michael Ian Black, voice of the sock puppet Pets.com launches in November 1998 with $50 million in Amazon-backed venture funding. The mascot, developed by TBWA\Chiat\Day, is a tube-sock puppet with a microphone and a tag line: BECAUSE PETS CAN'T DRIVE. The TV ads (Michael Ian Black voicing) air through 1999-2000, including a $1.2 million Super Bowl XXXIV spot in January 2000 and a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon in November 1999. The homepage version of the sock puppet is a small animated GIF, waving from the corner of the page on every product category. It is, by mid-2000, the MOST RECOGNIZED COMMERCIAL GIF of the dotcom era. It rivals the Dancing Baby (see [[dancing-baby-1996]]) in name-recognition, with the additional commercial machinery of a national ad campaign behind it. Video: The full sock-puppet ad set, including the 2000 Super Bowl spot that cost more than the company would ever earn in revenue.
