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The Pause That Refreshes
Today’s trash, tomorrow’s digital antiques
By Stephen Peters

I love old stuff, always have. Old cars, old houses, old magazines... old gifs. People out there save old Coke signs and copies of Life magazine, things evocative of another place and time. A few years ago I started saving memorable Web images for the same reason - the day will come when a "Get Netscape 2.0 Now!" gif will be as classic as a 20’s Coca Cola sign, a stylish reminder of the days when grama and grampa tooled around the ’net on their 486 with a 28.8 modem. While you might not remember it clearly, these images formed the mental wallpaper of our collective mind just a few years ago.

Here’s a few from my collection:

Someone spent a lot of time in Windows paintbox so that you would know that this is one cool homepage

This one actually isn’t very old at all. I nabbed it off betalounge.com because of that sweet smooth animation. This is an animated gif lover’s gif.

Remember the days when animated gifs were new? Every computer geek suddenly found out that they could do animations and seconds later every homepage dripped with dancing images. Thank god those days are over.

Even professional companies fell prey to the "if it rotates, they will come" mentality that spawned the famous "do you want your logo to spin, or flame, or both?" IBM commercial. I think I’m going to have to start collecting examples of Flash intros.

’nuff said

This denotes advanced Web technology. Don’t delay in grabbing this classic plugin!

Clue up those losers using Spyglass and Mosaic! Bring the Web to life! Like Burma-Shave signs these can still be found in remote, poorly updated sections of the Web. Living history.

Netscape’s lead spawned a million imitators.

The Web equivalent of the blacklight poster in your teenage basement bedroom. If you have this on your page, it means you are one tough customer.

A clever take on the ubiquitous "under construction" icons that cluttered the web in the early days.

Remember kids, everything that appears in your Web browser is stored on your very own hard drive. Right-click (Mac users click and hold) on the images you like and save a piece of history