Windows 7 by now, you are simply off the radar for browser upgrades.

The trouble, as all web developers know, is getting users to upgrade those browsers. Why is this always such a struggle? Older browsers are buggy, insecure, troublesome, and the hardest of all to develop for. We’ve gone for years like this, with a few hardy users getting the newest edition of everything, most of the crowd shuffling along within a year, and then there’s the die-hard long tail, bringing up the rear. They use IE7, IE6, even IE5.5, and you’ll get that old browser away from them when you pry it from their cold dead fingers. They make web designers pull out their hair.

Perhaps we have to make updates less frequent. Users of all software, be it Windows, Apple, or Linux, are familiar with software that has to be updated and patched at least a couple of times per year. But to the average user, they just don’t see the need. They buy a microwave or a DVD player, after all, which is good to use for ten years or more. What’s wrong with a web browser that they have to build a new one every six months?

We know that, but there’s a vast user wasteland out there that will never understand why.

Gopher – Gopher was one of the old Internet protocols before the WWW. It imposed a much stricter hierarchy on content, which had to be placed in folders and indexed with a text menu. It only lasted from 1991 to 1993. here is a list of still-functioning Gopher servers – amongst others, Firefox has a Gopher protocol. And here is an Ars Technica writeup on what the Gopher-heads are up to now.

BBS Banners – Just about the most amazing cultural Internat art ever, these were character graphic images done in ASCII or ANSI characters, which, when you dialed into a bulletin board system, would gradually scroll up welcoming you with all kinds of surprising artwork. Most of the graphic artists in the BBS community worked for free or little money; many are forgotten forever now. Here’s a whole gallery of rendered BBS art.

“Under Construction” GIFs – There was practically a whole subculture just revolving around animated gifs in the early web days. Believe it or not, you saw these things every day in the mid-’90s web. A whole gallery of Under Construction GIFs.

Old Portable Gadgets – Old digital gizmos were not much better than a programmable calculator with a hyperthyroid problem, but they’re amazing to revisit now. A blog devoted to cataloging these, called It Ain’t Dead Yet, has lots of shots that will jog your memory. Crikey! Is that a Timex Sinclair 1000?

Unix System Manuals – If you went to college in the 1970s and took comp-sci, chances are at some point you found yourself thumbing through stacks of manuals in a room full of noisy PDPs and Vaxes. Relive those days with this collection of original Unix First Edition Man Pages. Complete with a page for ‘b’, the compiler for the B programming language! What, you didn’t think they started with C, did you?

Peter Brittain
Digital Agency