I was webmaster for this site (and thousands of others at WB) back in 2001! I believe this was when we did the great www -> www2 migration, which was of course supposed to be temporary. In fact I think that was when we migrated from our own datacentre to AOL's but I could be getting the timing wrong.<p>Back then it was served from a Sun E4500 running Solaris (7?) and Netscape Enterprise Server. Netscape had been acquired by AOL which had also just bought Time Warner (that's why we moved to their datacentre) but somehow we couldn't make the internal accounting work and still had to buy server licenses.<p>Fun fact, unlike Apache, NES enabled the HTTP DELETE method out of the box and it had to be disabled in your config. We found that out the hard way when one of the sysadmins ran a vulnerability scanner which deleted all the websites. We were forbidden from running scans again by management.<p>Another fun fact about NES - they were really pushing server side Javascript as the development language for the web (and mostly losing to mod_perl). Also back in 2001 but at a different place I worked with the person who had just written a book on server side js for O'Reilly - he got his advance but they didn't publish it because by the time he had finished it they considered it a "dead technology".<p>Our job was basically to maintain an enormous config file for the webserver which was 99% redirects because they would buy every conceivable domain name for a movie which would all redirect to the canonical one. Famously they couldn't get a hold of matrix.com and had to use whatisthematrix.com. Us sysadmins ran our own IRC server and "302" was shorthand for "let's go" - "302 to a meeting". "302" on its own was "lunchtime".<p>I still mention maintaining this site on my CV and LinkedIn - disappointingly I've never been asked about it in an interview. I suspect most of the people doing the interviewing these days are too young to remember it.
Oh, that turkey. The movie, not the web site.<p>I once went to an industry presentation where someone on that project described the workflow.The project got into a cycle where the animators would animate on first shift, rendering was on second shift, printing to film was done on third shift. The next morning, the director, producer, and too many studio execs would look at the rushes from the overnight rendering. Changes would be ordered, and the cycle repeated.<p>The scene where the "talent" is being sucked out of players had problems with the "slime" effect. Production was stuck there for weeks as a new thing was tried each day. All the versions of this, of which there were far too many, were shown to us.<p>Way over budget. Cost about $80 million to make, which was huge in 1996. For comparison, Goldeneye (1995) cost $60 million.
Needs moar stars!<p>It’s such a nostalgic feeling of the earlier web back when just interest groups, universities, fan pages, web-rings ruled the web. Back before it became commercialized by greedy folks that threw ads all over the place, tracked everything you do and spammed the hell out of your inbox.<p>I miss the good ‘ol days for what the web was intended for.<p>One of my first projects was maintaining the site for: Looney Tunes Teaches the Internet.<p>If you look hard enough it’s still out there.
I love that 1996 HTML solved deep linking. It works flawlessly: <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz1a.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz1a.html</a><p>Look, I just linked to a wrong answer the middle of a quiz. It perfectly preserved all the state. (Fun quiz, too.)<p>This is mostly a tongue in cheek argument, but it has the benefit of being true.<p>Sadly the quiz seems broken at question 6. But you can even un-break the quiz by manually editing the URL to question 7: <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz7.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz7.html</a><p>Imagine trying to do that with a React app. (And I say that as a fan of react apps.)<p>The ending of the quiz is hilarious, by the way.
Aleksandar Totic from the original mosaic team has his website still up.<p><a href="http://totic.org/nscp/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://totic.org/nscp/index.html</a><p>Personally I enjoyed this bit:<p><a href="http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html" rel="nofollow">http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html</a><p>If Aleksandar reads hacker news I hope he never takes that down.
1994 checking in!<p><a href="http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/</a><p>Is anyone from Linköping University reading this? I need to thank them for 26 years of free hosting. :-)
Wondered how well it would rank on those insight scores,<p><a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spacejam.com%2F" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...</a><p>Looks like 80kb and they still find things.
> Unfortunately, this only works on a Macintosh running Netscape [1]<p>This is the most specific "best viewed with..." message I have seen.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/iconsframes.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/iconsframes.html</a>
If curious see also<p>2019 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473522" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473522</a><p>2020 (1 comment) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216203" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216203</a><p>(apparently it took 23 years to notice: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=spacejam.com" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=spacejam.com</a>)
You know, back in high school when I was learning HTML + JavaScript, I was really looking forward to creating websites that took "longer" to load[1]. Because I have associated that with complexity (understandable), and I associate complexity with coding professionally.<p>Now that I _am_ coding professionally, I just wish websites would load simple as this, with interfaces as simple as this. None of that fancy image preloading, or disappearing/reappearing navbars, or those sidebars that scrolled independently from the main page content.<p>Then again, what memories are those which time will not sweeten, right?<p>[1] Caveat: with the dial-up connections then, all it took were enough images for a site to load slow. So I wanted mine to take "longer"!
I think funnily enough, one thing that made these old websites more interesting is how slow the web was back then.<p>In a way it was "animation"— I'd look at images more closely as they "scanned" into the page and notice details I don't think I would now. In a way the fact that all these pages load instantly now is a bit of a downer. Maybe because there's no anticipation any more, or maybe just because the page seems more static and unchanging.
Of course it is still alive. It's one of those fixed-space-time-points that all the bloody turtles and elephants are balanced on. WE take that down, who knows where and when we will end up !?
My fan website for the Australian Band The Baby Animals from 1994 is still online.<p><a href="http://southcom.com.au/~tim/" rel="nofollow">http://southcom.com.au/~tim/</a>
The website moved a lot. See the Web Archive: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20041015000000*/spacejam.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20041015000000*/spacejam.com/</a><p>Some years it redirects to WB's website, sometimes to an archive website, etc.<p>It seems that the original was not accessible between 2000 and 2018.
<a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz2.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz2.html</a><p>Amusingly, exactly none of these answers are correct anymore (at least not until 2028, then again in 2031).
My mechanic’s website is a work of old-school art.<p><a href="http://www.waspauto.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.waspauto.com/</a>
What would the "PageRank" value be, if this site links to you ? Such an "old , esteemed" site should have some "High-XP/Google-Juice" Value ?
Looks like it's received the HN hug of death<p><pre><code> The connection has timed out
The server at www.spacejam.com is taking too long to respond.</code></pre>
You can't finish the quiz though - you get stuck on this page: <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz6.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz6.html</a><p>Should I contact Warner?
<a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/pressbox/credits.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/pressbox/credits.html</a><p>Love the shout outs to the people who made the site
It's got a status page, too: <a href="https://twitter.com/spacejamcheck?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/spacejamcheck?lang=en</a>
Fascinating. The web has changed so much and so quickly over 25 years.<p>Looking at <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/jump/linksframes.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/jump/linksframes.html</a><p>Self-evident how bad link rot can be! I think one of the links still work. A few in there point to the old Yahoo Directory.
Oh no! The mime types for the desktop “backboards” aren’t set right! My phone can’t render the Windows-compatible files or the Mac files!<p><a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/patternsframes.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/patternsframes.html</a>
Almost all the links here, and all the interesting ones, are gone: <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/bball/nbaframes.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/bball/nbaframes.html</a><p>The only remaining ones are ones I already knew about - nba.com and Yahoo! Sports.
Neat! OTOH, Peter Suber's Nomic page must win the contest "who has the biggest dead-to-live link ratio":<p><a href="https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm" rel="nofollow">https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm</a>
Oh, sitemaps. Maybe something like this could be a way to give a summary of a website again. <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/sitemap.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/sitemap.html</a>
I love this! "The jamminest two minutes of trailer time that ever hit a theater. It's 7.5 megs, it's Quicktime, and it's worth it. Click the graphic to download..."
looking through the source, there are a number of commented out links. Here is one:<p><a href="https://www.spacejam.com/video/" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacejam.com/video/</a>
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/hong-kong-security-law-fear.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/hong-kong-security-...</a> The last part is reading in conjunction with this made me feel ... is web site more safe at least easier to be preserved than social media? I do not doubt whether one program can deep delete social media messages, at least one can ship one's web site as an archive and it is still readable. Priatebay like but for individual ... so easy to silence in social media compared with well Space Jam.