Then and Now
The Telegraph has an interesting selection of screen grabs entitled ‘How 20 popular websites looked when they launched’.
Have a look and relive some memories.
The BBC, YouTube, Google: they’re all there in the internet equivalent of black and white.
One exception from the list, however, is Harry’s Place. To remedy that state of affairs I’ve dredged up an old Harry’s Place masthead we sported shortly after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled in Iraq.
Note for newer readers: The young lady in red on the right hand side is an Iraqi Communist celebrating the legalisation of leftwing political parties and the return of elections brazenly demonstrating her party’s deviationist collaboration with the occupiers and foolishly flaunting her status amongst all right-thinking Leftists as a quisling fit only to be shunned.
Comments
| 3 September 2009, 8:53 am |
I remember Google and Yahoo looking like that. The BBC too. And HP.
Most of the rest? No. Not even Amazon.
| 3 September 2009, 9:18 am |
One of the headlines in the screen grab from the Telegraph (2002) is “Blast at Israeli Shooping Mall”.
| 3 September 2009, 9:23 am |
Any chance we could go back to being left-wing?
| 3 September 2009, 9:30 am |
What? No credits to Will for designing the HP classic masthead?
You can all go fuck yourselves with a pick axe and have your faces planed
into bone dust, you dirty %^$S^* ungrateful &^#$@&! scum###!^^
sucking fuckwads!!!
Otherwise, how’s things?
| 3 September 2009, 10:02 am |
“No credits to Will for designing the HP classic masthead?” Why Will? I may be misremembering this, but wasn’t it Hak Mao who designed it?
| 3 September 2009, 10:54 am |
Mike S
3 September 2009, 9:23 am
“Any chance we could go back to being left-wing?”
Okay.
- Jews exagerate the holocaust.
- Israel is uniquely evil.
- Saddam was terrible but…..
- I eat Palestinian babies, although when feeling a bit guilty I just stick to harvesting their organs.
- Seven Jewish children is one of the most insightful plays ever written.
There you go. We are all ‘left wing’ now eh. I might even get a job at The Guardian, that ‘left wing’ paper.
Even better, go off and write your own ‘left wing’ blog. Then you can tell everyone what left wing is nowadays.
Cos, it doesn’t really mean shit anymore.
MattG
| 3 September 2009, 11:15 am |
What about the fallen stars? The altavistas, boo.com and lycoses that were going to take over the world? I remember the early telegraph webpage and it was even bluer than that example, pretty much had to highlight the story with the mouse to make it readable. Them there was the trend for elaborate flash animation opening pages that took ages to load (but I dare say looked great when the designers demoed it to the marketing suits on a machine loading the site from hard drive.) I couldn’t get onto vodafone’s site at work even though we had broadband. Flash would start then the pc rapidly ground to a halt.
| 3 September 2009, 1:11 pm |
MikeS, yeah why not start a blog and show people how to do it?
http://wordpress.com/ It will take you 5 minutes to set-up.
| 3 September 2009, 1:57 pm |
Ah, but it must be said that, possibly more than pretty much any one-time HP regular, Will is not missed from the comments threads chez HP at all; all he ever had to offer here was vindictive pettyness and disruptive axe-grinding combined with an deluded and infantile Weltanschaaung, laden with snide insinuations and a tendency to team up in a bullying fashion with odious and no less unsavoury allies. In fact his appearance could be guaranteed to distract attention from the subject at hand to promote his own rather noxious and vile prejudices and facile hero-worship. (But such has been what has generally passed for mainstream left-wing politics since time immemorial – well, since the French Terror, anyway….)
(And, of course; that is NOT the original HP header…as real long-time readers will recall…I’m sure Marcus is aware of that)
Back on topic – the Telegraph website was great when it was blue. Those was the days when the paper version was worth reading, too. Oh how that age has passed.
The BBC News one is probably the one that has improved the most. (in functionality as well as content)
| 3 September 2009, 3:22 pm |
Does anyone know what has happened to Will? Has he fallen under a bus or something?
| 3 September 2009, 4:20 pm |
I kind of liked the old format for HP. I was sorry to see it go. This one is just so-so. Sorry.
| 3 September 2009, 4:40 pm |
SueR
3 September 2009, 3:22 pm
Does anyone know what has happened to Will? Has he fallen under a bus or something?
————-
I suspect the junior schools on Teesside opened again on Tuesday, so we probably won’t hear much from him until he gets expelled again.
| 3 September 2009, 4:47 pm |
and a tendency to team up in a bullying fashion with odious and no less unsavoury allies
Who were Will’s “odious” and “unsavoury” allies? I don’t consider Terry Glavin, Shuggy, Hak Mao, or Jim Denham, to name a few of DSTPfW’s contributors and commenters, either unsavoury or odious. I reserve terms like odious and unsavoury for creepy Ikhwani arselickers like Ken Livingstone whose only saving grace was that he made the trains run on time.
| 3 September 2009, 5:43 pm |
Well I certainly don’t consider Terry Glavin or Shuggy (less still Ken Livingstone, your parodic description of whom, and its oh-so-dariong and oh-so-original comparison with Mussolini (and, what then of Berlusconi, who associates and allies and governs for real with fascists), would be disgusting and libellious were it not so pathetically, not to say bathetically, amusing, and reflect so badly on the proponent of such a preposterous view) to be either odious or unsavoury.
(Don’t interpret this to mean that I do automatically consider Hak Mao or Jim Denham to be such: I don’t know enough, and don’t care to know enough, about either of them to comment. In general life is far too short to waste it on reading the stuff of authoritarian leftist extremists or apologists for the evil genius of the Red Army, the proponant of “doing away with all the papero-Quakist nonsense about the sanctity of human life” that was Monsieur Trotsky)
Christopher Hitchens, however….yeah, i think unsavoury will do, for sure.
But there is no denying that Will’s presence in the HP comments threads, or the stuff he would post at either of his websites…was essentially the stuff of knuckle-kicking violent and hateful leftist bully-boys, apologia for decades of Marxist-influenced murder and oppression. Soviet propaganda, basically. Disgusting stuff.
| 3 September 2009, 6:23 pm |
Shuggy ain’t odious, he’s actually very thoughtful.
| 3 September 2009, 7:39 pm |
Ah, the good old days. Back when HP was a noticeably rosier hue of pink than it is now. I rather miss the bare knuckle fights between the sensible left and the idiot left that used to pepper the comments boxes. These days the bare knuckle fights seem to be with the Daily Mail readers and Eurabists in the comments boxes. The idiot left seemed rather to give up. Shame, as they were more sensible and intelligent loons than the class of loons you get these days.
And the way every thread would end up turning around to Iraq. Nostalgia. Good stuff.
| 3 September 2009, 7:56 pm |
Ken Livingstone made the trains run on time? (joke question)
About Berlusconi: It would be honest if he gave up the pretense of leading a democracy and rule as the new IL Duce of the second Fascist Italy that he so obviously wants to be.
| 3 September 2009, 11:52 pm |
Ken Livingstone made the trains run on time? (joke question)
The bendy buses were never more than about five minutes late (I’m sure Mussolini would never have boarded a bus anyway…)
In Will’s defence he always had a laboured theatricality that the likes of Sonic couldn’t reach – Brecht on Special Brew (if you will.)
Nice font.
Perhaps the HP masthead could revert to reversed Rs to give it that ‘in your face’ feel.