2000 Onion article is oddly prescient

The Onion posted a piece back in 2000 which made fun of the idea that we might someday use the internet for everything--apparently, this idea was ludicrous in 2000.  I guess I do remember my WebTV being so incredibly slow that I often wouldn't notice for several minutes that someone had picked up the phone and I was no longer connected because seriously, fuck dialup.  Ah, childhood.

Jesus fuck, WebTV.  I just want to look up my damn Pokemon walkthroughs why is this so hard fuuuuuuuck.

 Here's the Onion headline I mentioned:

Comedy in 2000 becomes a boring factual article in 2012.  Progress!

Ha-ha, checking a newspaper website for movie times?  How quaint.  We all have apps to do that now. 
The article continues:

Larry has used the Internet to assist friends, as well. "Last week, we had a houseguest who was wondering if there were any Jesuit colleges in Ohio," Wisniewski said. "All I had to do was open up my AOL software, enter my password, point the browser to www.yahoo.com, and click on Society & Culture, followed by Religion & Spirituality. From there, I had only to click Faiths & Practices, then Christianity, then Denominations & Sects, and then Catholic. Then I simply clicked on Orders, Jesuits, Colleges & Universities, Ohio, and boom, right there in front of me are Xavier University in Cincinnati and John Carroll University in Cleveland."


Aside from the ladders of links that Area Man has to navigate to find information, this is basically how a lot of people look things up now.  Google was in existence in 2000, but hadn't totally taken off yet, so people were still going through page after page of Yahoo! links and using AOL keywords to find things. 

No, Grandma, that's not where that goes, and you should really pick a new password.

Wisniewski's friends, for their part, are impressed by his technological savvy and access to limitless global databases. "I feel like such a caveman for looking up phone numbers in a phone book," neighbor Steve Lindblad said. "All those pages and that ink–it's so embarrassing."

It's funny because that really would be kind of embarrassing now.  I don't think I even have a phone book.  The last phone book I remember having was the one we set on fire in a dorm basement (NOTE: depending on who's asking, I did not set a phone book on fire in a college dorm.  I was studying that night).

For all of Wisniewski's success in surfing for online info, he said Pamela is "still getting the hang" of the Internet and its power. "Pam is always asking stuff like, 'Why don't we just look the word up in our old-fashioned dictionary?'" Wisniewski said. "The answer, of course, is simple: because we don't have to."

I can only assume that this article was funny when it was written because there was a time when early adopters were a little over-excited about the internet.  It used to be super slow, and there was a time when retrieving a dictionary was faster than waiting for this:

And this:

The use of an old-timey wooden sailing ship tiller in the loading screen turned out to be quite appropriate.

Just to look up one word, that might be excessive.  Actually, looking at all this old internet stuff, it's pretty amazing just how quickly this Onion article became factually accurate.  Thanks for being ahead of the curve, Area Man!

Dole/Kemp '96 website still operational, still extremely old

Here is a site which should have vanished long ago but luckily has not, so we can explore the natural beauty that is a 1996 presidential campaign page.  The homepage appears below (seriously, full quality, as it appears on the page). 

According to this, Dole had 2 issues he cared about: K-12 education, and Technology and Internet.  

Reading through the updates yields the following description of the page:

On August 1, Dole for President unveiled the first individually 
customizable political web site. If you haven't been to the new site, 
here's a rundown:

When you first visit the site, you are given the option of setting up a 
custom Dole web page. (Requires a Netscape 2.0 compatible 
browser)

That is in fact the font that they used.  For all I know, that was the only font on the internet in 1996.  Sadly, without a Netscape 2.0 compatible browser, I was unable to customize my Dole web page (I wanted to focus on the issues most important to me: federal regulation of bourbon quality and photogenic cats getting the right to vote).  Having been stymied on that front, I went back to the homepage, when I noticed this image:

Pretty sure we've found the oldest gif on the internet.

After admiring that for several minutes, I moved on to the "Dole Kemp '96 Interactive" page, because all of the other links are broken.  Alas, the crossword, make-a-button, and send-a-postcard options were no longer active--you can, however, still obtain Bob Dole desktop wallpaper!  There are 9 options:

Is his dog named Leader?  I think his dog is named Leader.

Attempting to get a large version of any of these was an ultimately failed endeavor--here's what a Dole/Kemp wallpaper at full size looks like:

Maybe he just had one of those really old computers with a tiny screen?

After some further research, I found the issue:

Right now, we feature a variety of downloadable wallpaper images. Decorate your desktop with Dole for President graphics! The images below are shown at 50% of their actual size and are designed to tile seamlessly on your desktop.

Ummmm...no.  That can't be right.  Can it?

I guess the campaign strategy was to convince everyone that total control by our robot Dole overlords was inevitable.

So, yeah, that doesn't look great.  Also I can't locate any of my desktop icons now, and my computer is refusing to do anything for me until I change the desktop back.  Let's keep in mind the most important thing here, though.  It was time for the internet to change, and thanks to Bob Dole, IT HAS...

The future is here, and it's a tiled desktop wallpaper.