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Websites - Wayback™ When
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Websites - Wayback™ When It is interesting to see how familiar websites have evolved over the years. If
you began using the Internet when I did back in the early 1990s, you remember the
4800 baud dialup connections and
In the early days of the Internet, conscientious web designers attempted to use minimal graphics and rely on thoughtful page layout using HTML formatting to place text and tables in strategic areas to give the illusion of a graphical page without the bandwidth burden. Unbelievably, there were websites that consisted of a single large graphic that contained all the pictures and text; they took forever to load and presented you with a blank screen until all the bits had transferred. Overly wasteful Flash type entry screens are modern day equivalents of that. Many of us studied reports on Web user likes and dislikes for site features, and attempted to accommodate those wishes so as to maximize the visitor's positive impression.
The Wayback™ Machine, provided by the website Archive.org, captures and stores snapshots of web pages over time, so you can go there, enter the website address of interest, and probably discover what the website looked like many years ago. It contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. "This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress." Records begin around 1996.
Archival websites like Archive.org, Google, and others, are used quite often by law enforcement and legal researchers to gather evidence for trials. Recent events in U.S. politics have exposed situations where websites would pull down information after a public outcry had challenged a person or organization for their statements and/or policies. People are learning that in this Information Age, everything they say can and will be used against them, even if they thought it was only to be seen/heard by a privileged few. Even employers are searching archives of web pages in their vetting of potential employees. You have been warned. I decided to take a look at what the websites of RF Cafe's advertisers looked like in the days of yore. Most had at least one screen shot in the archives. All screen captures are done in the same browser window size (just wide enough to enclose the RF Cafe screen), and then proportionally resized to a common height, so the change in page width is apparent. Some web pages were (and still are) set up to automatically fill the available browser width, like RFMD's, so a width comparison is not possible. They are in random order below, so you might want to do a Crtl+F to search for a company name on the screen. In some cases the company is a conglomeration of multiple other formerly independent companies, like with Spectrum Microwave which includes the former Salisbury Engineering, Q-Bit, Amplifonix, and others. With those, I tried to find examples of the former company's web pages. Also, for some reason the Wayback™ Machine does not always capture the graphic images associated with the page, so in the place of the intended images are the white placeholders and the annoying little red "x." Because of that, I do not always have the earliest available screen shot here, but instead used the most complete page available. Some websites are so new that the Wayback™ Machine has not found them yet. You can see in the first example that RF Cafe has changed just a little since its inception in 1999. It was originally a step up from my RFTools website on the AOL personal homepage system. RFTools.com was not available, and the [Something]Cafe.com type names were popular at the time, so RFCafe.com was born. It has since grown to be a major player in the RF engineering web space. Because of dedicated visitors (like you), my many advertisers have provided the opportunity for me to run RF Cafe on a full-time basis. Thanks to them and to you. Let me know if you would like to have your company's website added to the list.
Posted September 8, 2009 |
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About RF Cafe
Copyright: 1996 - 2024 Web BSEE - KB3UON RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps while tying up your telephone line, and a nice lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail" when a new message arrived... All trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other rights of ownership to images
and text used on the RF Cafe website are hereby acknowl My Hobby Website: |
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