Microsoft's homepage circa 1994 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's homepage circa 1994

microsoft.com

39 pointsmjswensen25 comments

I cannot navigate the site at all (unless I use the text menu), I always get:

Your current User-Agent string appears to be from an automated process, if this is incorrect, please click this link:United States English Microsoft Homepage

when I click on the disk. I don't feel like a robot though.

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on it's back. The tortoise lays on it's back, it's belly baking in the hot sun, beating it's legs trying to turn it'self over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response... Shall we continue?

Let me tell you about my mother

I believe the point is to demo the homepage only, not the full site.

what's wrong with my user agent?

It's from an automated process. Are you an automated process?

If you take into consideration that our bodies can keep us alive without any cognitive input (ex: people in comas) then yes, I guess we are all automated processes, thanks to the hypothalamus :)

Cut them some slack, the site is apparently running on Windows NT 3.5. It can't be expected to work.

I thought they just didn't like Linux users, so I had the intern try the link on his MBP. No dice. Maybe it responds like that to everyone not coming from a Windows 3.11 box.

gopher.microsoft.com. Excellent.

There's also a readme.html with notes on reconstructing this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html

Those variable names... `var varSegmentation=0;`

hungarian typing

Hungarian dynamic typing even - just prefix everything with var.

Thats pretty funny when taken literal, like this. On the other hand I often do file_str and file_num to help myself.

After a journey into functional programming where single letter variable is almost the norm, I came back hating this redundancy, but after a while I got to see that variables names will pop up in different places, you might as well stick a bit more information in their name just in case you're missing context deep down the stack or in a commit.

Hoon?

Only sort-of! `var intSegmentation` would have been less surprising.

And in 1998: http://web.archive.org/web/19981205060735/http://microsoft.c...

Internet Explorer was still a year away. Did they add a "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer" button later?

... and the associated readme with some background info:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html

Darn, I was hoping to peruse the old HTML to see how they positioned the links in a fun little table structure. Just a big GIF. Or maybe this was the real deal and they used a Image Map (since removed).

That reminds me of the Publisher 97 method of creating web pages: One full size gif with a small HTML wrapper.

image maps werent even a thing yet! Pretty neat little writeup - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html

The Microsoft games circa 1997 was partially online too. Web Design Nostaligia in full effect.

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