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Screenshot of Microsoft.com's First Web Page

microsoft.com — This is a flash back to the early days, when this sort of design would have been THE SITE.

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  • tuxidomasx, on 10/12/2007, -6/+36...omg
    looks like someone's grandma made it. haha. its amazing to see how far the web has come (in terms of both browsers and design).
  • toekneebullard, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8agreed. I love how they introduce you to their "world wide web server."
  • TheAttacks, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4if you click the photo, it'll go back to the "history" as of 1999, which I was reading. There are several more versions I'm sure the developers would love to forget.
  • capellathestar, on 10/12/2007, -7/+44"If your browser does not support images.."

    ROFL!
    • p014k, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2Ya rofl. Thats the first thing i noticed. That is hularious.
    • mwebb1984, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5It would be usefull if several sites still had an html menu instead of only flash today. Try browsing on a cellphone on regular web pages... or if you're on a very low bandwidth connection. (I've actually turned off loading of images a few times in the past 6 months when I was on low bw connection.)
    • okcookienc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4you whipper snappers just dont get it, huh? back in the day, this was awesome. the web beat the hell out of BBSes, which we had been using for some time (me since the 80s.) ah, the good ol days
    • msgmsg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2back then they said "if your browser doesnt support images, heres an alternative page" nowadays, its "if your browser doesn't support images.... upgrade to the new IE6!"
  • Sparklehorse, on 10/12/2007, -12/+60Old News:
    Last Updated: December 24, 1999
    • TheAttacks, on 10/12/2007, -37/+5You're kidding right. . . .
    • chicken101, on 10/12/2007, -26/+5If he's joking, that's funny as hell
    • JustMatt, on 10/12/2007, -14/+9Says so...right there at the bottom of the page...
  • hwh43, on 10/12/2007, -49/+2lolol
  • davidv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+24If your browser doesn't support images, we have a *text* menu as well.


    Ahhh the good ol days!
  • joel2600, on 10/12/2007, -18/+37now it's a decade later and craigslist still can't design a site to look any better than this
    • cheese06, on 10/12/2007, -9/+22to joel2600. you'd rather have craigslist be full of flash animations and cool ajax? did you totally forget about usability and ease of use? its about quality, not who has the most up to date html/flash techniques.
    • robinyang, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Good design can exist without fancy HTML/flash elements (in fact, some sites using flash are among some of the worst I've seen). I think he's referring to the relatively generic look that craigslist currents sports.
    • dolby, on 10/12/2007, -11/+11Why would you attack Craigslist? The site is clean and simple, like google. The simplicity is why the site is a hit.
    • Seumas, on 10/12/2007, -27/+11Craigslist is a hit for the same reason MySpae is a hit -- people are stupid.
    • MrUnderbridge, on 10/12/2007, -10/+6The question isn't whether Craigslist can hire a sensitive little emo "Web 2.0" acolyte to design their site and make it stylish. The question is whether Craigslist's design is functional, or whether it's getting in the way of using it. And I strongly believe the answer is no. There are too many armchair webdesigners who would put form well ahead of function. Screw that. Craigslist works. it works damned well. Don't cruft it up.
    • imtigger2, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11I know you guys aren't going to like this comment.... but I think Digg is heading in the same wrong direction. It used to be a clean, easy, simple interface that keeps adding on more and more. If they keep going this way, it's going to be a mess eventually. I'm hoping for the best.
    • oliyoung, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3it's deliberate, both craigslist and eBay are deliberatly shoddy design, it's the "flea market" approach, if your interface looks too over design you tend to alienate the kind of people who eventually become your customers .. eBay and Craiglist both have the money to redesign, they just chose not to ..
  • Quarks, on 10/12/2007, -4/+40This is from 1994, the good old days.
    Amazing that they only had 3 servers running microsoft.com

    The bloopers are nice :-D

    "Mark Ingalls recalls how he mistakenly deleted the live default.htm file that served as the microsoft.com home page, in the days before staging servers. While home page visitors were receiving File Not Found errors, Ingalls rooted around in his browser cache - where the cache filenames did NOT map to their real names - to find and restore the page to active duty.


    The predecessor to MSNBC, known then as MSN News, was first published prematurely when a member of the production team, sitting up on a desk to study a schematic, clicked a mouse button with his derriere. The team watched in horror as the content went live to a public server before it was ready.


    For the Internet Explorer 3.0 launch, the product support team released a fully overhauled knowledge base. However, their production environment didn't mirror the Web server, and the site was published without running a vital script that adjusted the drive letter used for the access point on the live Web machines. When customers tried to search the knowledge base, they'd get errors instead of results.


    A vendor who had only a passing knowledge of microsoft.com coding policies delivered the first Windows CE site. The first test on the site with Weblint, a tool used to check validity of HTML, returned 100 pages of errors. There was a harried pre-Comdex weekend in November 1996 where every link and quite a bit of other code on the several hundred page site was manually recoded by a handful of people so it could be published in time for Bill Gates' Sunday night keynote.

    The first try at personalization on microsoft.com, with a home page that marked headlines as read once a user had clicked them, wasn't tested for scalability to a large Internet audience. The technology worked fine on an internal Microsoft intranet site, so it was simply ported to the live site. It wasn't long before the feature was removed due to its decimating impact on live Web servers."
    • TheAttacks, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Yeah, I was reading those, the one about the guy sitting on the mouse is classic!
  • en3r0, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5That is insane... Reminds me of old old clan websites people used to host on Geocities, lol.
    ___________
    -en3r0
    http://virtenu.com
    • capellathestar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15the animated gifs...the horrid MIDI...*sighs* Ahh, the good old days...
    • lukes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2the blinking, scrolling text. the black text on an obnoxious background .. ah yes, i had many geocities websites. : )
    • Bentinney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Haha the good old days or I guess you could also call that myspace.
  • energyblue, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13I can't see the picture, can someone link me to the text verson?
    lol, kidding.
    +digg.
  • chiefcrazytalk, on 10/12/2007, -65/+1Fake - no digg. Didn't the "Where do you want to go today" slogan come much later? Or am I turning senile?
    • Goatman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Considering it's linked off of Micrsoft's site, I doubt it's a fake.
    • lalindsey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5why would microsoft archive a "fake" old version of their own website??
    • lordjafar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Muppet
  • transpot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Gotta love the cyan links on lame space pic!.
  • kevinrose, on 10/12/2007, -35/+61Is it just me or is this design somehow better than the existing microsoft.com site?
    • chicken101, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Less annoying for sure. =P
    • Seumas, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Probably the first, last and only time anything microsoft did kept with any actual standards. :)
    • cheese06, on 10/12/2007, -16/+13no kevin, no.
    • StealthTomato, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Meh, as funny as it is to say that, I'd have to disagree, Kevin. That looks like some 8-year-old's homepage ~7 years ago. The current design, while slow, at least doesn't try to be _too_ flashy. Granted, there's still a bit of excess bells and whistles, but that's not terrible.
    • bdude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I here ya, boy do I hear ya
    • captn_insano, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I bet that old site was alot easier to navigate.
    • farhadG55, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2its just you.
  • chicken101, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yeah, my browser doesn't support images. =P

    Oh, the good old days, sad and glad they've past.
  • WoozyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2We are laughing and amazed about this now, I am wondering what web pages are look like in 20 years time! Yaaaay
  • beelz, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3World Wide Web Server.
  • oofki, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That is still better than anything I have ever made! I mean... god thats ugly.
  • monkeyseamonkey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1amazing -- their logo hasn't changed
  • digitalsin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I love the GOPHER link =)
    • evilneuro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I still remember gopher ... ah, halcyon days.
    • tybris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I don't think I've seen a gopher page yet this century :(
  • rabiddogma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15I like it, it's very Web .2
  • MikeEFresh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6It looks like the Wu-Tang Clan logo, without the cuts at the top and bottom.
  • affanjam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2page views per day 124,655
    look at the newer old desing
    http://www.microsoft.com/misc/features/features_flshbk_hp3.htm
  • dolby, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4In 10 years or so digg will be considered an "old school design"
    • aMillionAndNine, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Duh!
    • a1programmer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Believe it or not, I'd say before then. (The current "design" and technology that is).
    • tra242, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Are you kidding? With all these bitchin rounded corners, standard pastel colors, and the ubiquitous text-heavy styling? It's still gonna be cutting edge 20 years from now. Kind of like the 80s.
    • lalindsey, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2tra: text-heavy styling?? that's called typography dude.
  • Massif, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Oh the days of the grey background. Good stuff.
  • FazzMunkle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Apple's site wasn't that much better. But at least it wasn't a jumble of links...
  • vigilanteweb, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Not sure that design is going to win any SXSW awards... but I guess everything had to start somewhere right?
  • TexMachina, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4EMWACS, I remember this site!

    A Pre-IIS WWW, when Netscape Web Servers roamed free, SSL was new and BBS's were starting to feel the pinch.
  • a1programmer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Wow, funny do think that I didn't even have a computer until 1998 or so, and I'm a Web Developer. :)
  • voldak, on 10/12/2007, -11/+5I miss the way the web used to be..........but, don't get me wrong....the web still pwns your face.
  • jodamiller, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Click the image to get to the article, then look at the image at the bottom and read the link:

    "Microsoft reacts to the DOJ"

    Page ran from Aug-Nov 1995. Microsoft has been battling one court or another for over 10 years now.
  • EtherGnat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I remember that site from when I first got an Internet account. Even for the time it was horrendously ugly and slow as hell to load. I designed my first page back then too--my big concern was whether browsers would support the center tag. Ah, the memories.

    I've tried to find an archive of that page before so I'll digg it. Archive.org only goes back to 1996.
  • cranium, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2And even THAT one was dog-slow.
  • withinavoid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4ROFL the old death star page. I remember that.
  • skyshock21, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10HA! That's not the funny part though... the funny part is the picture of Mark Ingalls next to their first rack of Internet Servers... http://www.microsoft.com/library/images/gifs/stories/flshbk_mark.gif

    LOL! What a tool!
    • evilneuro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1hehe, three compaq proliants, and what looks like a pull out keyboard tray. To think that those 8U monsters were uberl33t at the time ...
    • Conky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1A button-up neck shirt tucked into black work-out shorts. CLASSIC.
  • jakejarvis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"Ingalls and his ragtag crew converted much of the patchwork content for the site themselves using an automated rich text-to-HTML process..."

    haha WYSIWYG in 1994
  • andoru, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I like how the name of the browser on the window's title bar has magically vanished.
  • DrGamez, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3... jesus.
  • EtherGnat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Basically the entire page was one huge image map. And 14.4kbs was considered fast. *shudder*
  • ajwillys, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2TIGHT!
  • TRUEPATRIOT, on 10/12/2007, -15/+4so am i the only one tired of all the crappy stories of old screen shots of things?
    no digg this is lame
  • dendrimer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13were they building the freakin death star??
    • Milo_Hoffman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I think that their desire to destroy small innocent planets and rule the empire with a iron fist using an army of faceless atomatons has been pretty much realized at this point...dont you?

    • ,,|,_, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5This is pre-deathstar Microsoft.
  • GeneralFailure, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Glad to see that nothing has changed.
  • daemoncel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I remember when i saw this site on Mosaic 1.0

    not even Internet Explorer.
  • giveaphuk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1ohhh soo was it created with microsoft products... hmmm, i wonder what apples 1st website looked like?

  • antdude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2http://web.archive.org/web/19961020014044/http://www.microsoft.com/ from 10/20/1996!

    See http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://microsoft.com for more.
  • JubbaG, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
  • JayRod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Most if not all the websites were like that back in the day, like 10 or 12 years ago. A title, a picture or two some links and links at the bottom of the page to take you back to home page or other shortcuts. The pictures couldn't be too big (file size) as dial-up roamed the land of the internet. 33k was in and 56K was around the corner. And that was it. No ads, no spyware, no cookies. Maybe it should've stayed that way. All using plain html. I remember doing a webpage on geocities like that. I also remember going for the top of the line U.S. Robotics 56k modem and it was expensive. I paid extra for the name. And then 3D graphics came along. One video card for 2D and one for 3D (SLI connected a la crossfire) and the rest is history.
  • xLiKx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2wow, that brings back memories when the web actually looked like that. kids have it all these days
  • agimat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The first thing i thought off when i saw that screenshot was "Unfinished Deathstar"
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