Antique Web Browsers Still Surfing at DejaVu.Org

A few nights ago, I came across an extraordinary site that's been online for several years called DejaVu.org. It isn't a new site (it went online in the late 1990's), but its main offerings - a timeline of Web development, and a uniquely compelling WWW browser emulator that lets the Web surfer see sites the way early Web pioneers experienced them, using vintage NSCA Mosaic 0.9, Netscape 1.0, Internet Explorer 2.0, Lynx, line-mode, and even my personal favorite: the famed HotJava browser - have grown even more appealing as time has moved on. We were so moved by the experience of viewing the Web in this way that we reached out to DejaVu.org's creator, Par Lannero, and he granted us this brief interview from Stockholm.

Ghost Sites: What was the inspiration behind DejaVu.org?

Par Lannero: As you can read in the timeline part of dejavu.org, I was watching and taking part in the development of the Web from a very early stage. Everybody I knew in the IT sector 1996-1998 was playing around with fun Web ideas, and dejavu was simply one of many ideas I came up with. Another one was a Web-based buddy list system which I finished the day before Somebody told me about a similar project from a company called Mirabilis. With the speed that their project spread over the Internet, there was no use in releasing my own project. Yet another idea was a system to manage Web bookmarks on the Web instead of in the browser client. That one I actually implemented, and I have been using it almost every day since 1996. It wasn't just me - everybody seemed to come up with fun ideas those days... :)

Ghost Sites: It looks to me that several people besides yourself were instrumental in creating the browser emulators. Who did what and how long did it take to get it going?

Par Lannero: My friend Elias Bengtsson and a Ville Hising at Bazooka.se produced a few images. Per Gullfeldt of Digital Equipment Corporation provided a server as sponsorship. Daniel Bergström has made sure the Web server is (almost) always up and running. The rest of the people in the credits list are colleagues from the time when I was working with dejavu. They provided the necessary encouragement for me to actually launch the site. I did all programming and writing by myself. Mostly in 1997-98, but I have been fixing a few things since then.

Ghost Sites: As you're probably aware, there is a lot more historical Web matter online than there was back in the late 1990's. I speak specifically of archive.org's massive "Wayback Machine". Do you have any plans to work with this organization so that your browser emulator might be used to view some of the preserved historical sites?

Par Lannero: I have thought about that, too. But since I have no income from the dejavu project, I can only spend a few hours now and then. If I get sponsorship or if I lose my job or something I might be able to develop the site further. One big advantage, though, when dealing with history, is that it doesn't change very quickly, so there is no hurry. :)

Ghost Sites: Your excellent Timeline of Web Innovation seems to stop at the end of 1999. Why does it end here? Did innovation trail off or did you stop work on DejaVu.org? If the latter, do you have any plans to revive it?

Par Lannero: I have not spent much time updating the site since 1999. Of course, a few things have happened since then, but I definitely think innovation slowed down around 1998. Before that year I always used a beta version of Netscape - every new improvement was worth the time it took to download and install. Today I don't care what browser I use, since there is nothing much happening.

In Praise of Hand-Typed HTML Dinosaurs

A Ghost Sites correspondent named Jorg sends word that his Web page, devoted to the albums, songs and lyrics of George Harrison, is still alive and ticking after 10 years of faithful service.

I really like this ancient page, which despite a few updates, hasn't changed its basic form in 10 years. Check out that fabulous tiling background graphic, the centered text, and the complete absence of Web 2.0 artifacts such as Adsense code and social widgets. Sites like this remind me of the shark, a life form so efficient that it hasn't evolved in hundreds of thousands of years.

This site is clearly an exception to George Harrison's rule that "all things must pass."

Exploring the Lost Canon of ANSI Art

It's eye-opening to get a glimpse of what online life, culture, aesthetics, and graphics were like a mere 10 or 12 years ago. One of the best places to get reacquainted with the lost zeitgeist of this prehistoric, pre-Web era is by pointing your browser to one of the Web's many obscure repositories of ANSI Art. What was ANSI Art? Well, according to the Webopedia, this brief but important computer art movement owed its origin to the inclusion of a device driver called ANSI.SYS that was first bundled with MS-DOS 3.3. This driver allowed "extended screen codes", otherwise known as "escape sequences", to be used to define a series of colors that considerably spiced up MS-DOS's traditionally ominous and forbidding "jet black" screen interface. Images created in this way frequently migrated out to Bulletin Board Systems, in fact, it was the very popularity of these BBS's which created a demand for so many of them.

The easiest way to get a feel for the ANSI Art genre is at http://www.mjbdiver.com/ansi/. Here, through clever use of a Java applet, 35 early ANSI works - many of them serving as the home pages of BBS systems - are easily accessible. ANSI Art was never really accepted by "serious digital artists" (who used Macs with better resolution and higher color depths), and perhaps the state of psychological exile - imposed from within by the limitations of ANSI, and from without by the scorn of the "fine arts" Mac-heads explains the negative images we often see in ANSI collections.

At mjbdiver's site, we find more than our fair share of images reflecting situations of conflict, alienation, destruction, death,
extinction,
repression, and
isolation. Happy/positive images are frequently presented by alien presences, or as an experience that a human is enjoying in solitude (eg. fishing or walking on a beach).

Images in "Remembrance Pack", a remarkable collection of 1989-91 ANSI work by the artist SHADOW DEMON available for download at: http://www.acid.org/ftp/aaa-8991.zip explore the outer limits of abstraction possible within ANSI - to the point that some observers need to spend many minutes studying these images before being able to parse through any possible meaning. This artifact - I term it "ANSI image blanking", is caused by the fact that viewing these images locally is a very different experience than viewing them when using a slow 2,400 BPS modem - the delivery platform for which they were designed. Of course, the users experiencing these screens in 1990 or '91 had a very different experience - the screens scrolled, often at 14.4K, slowly from top to bottom, hence the consistent placement of text at the upper-left hand corner, where it would be displayed first - tipping the user off as to what was being illustrated, which appeared slowly, line-by-line, as the data was passed from the BBS to the user.

As a result of this low-bandwidth delivery method, ANSI Art became spectacularly, floridly abstract (one might even say "fauvist"). Artists like SHADOW DEMON freely used the 640 x 480 space to move and morph text to reaches of abstraction often seen in subway graffiti, but very seldome elsewhere. Blocky figures - human or otherwise - looked cartoonish in the same way that Keith Haring's subway chalk drawings were crudely symbolic - pictograms made on the fly, as temporary interfaces - pre-Web, proto-interactive experiments that existed free of any necessary expectation of permanence (Haring's early chalk drawings were literally often wiped off subway walls, often in just a few hours, by the movement of rush-hour crowds). Other examples - animated crudely, with strangely sized ASCII text elements mixed in, recall Stuart Davis, as well as just about every artist ever commissioned to design a jacket patch for the Hell's Angels. (Note: there are two "erotic" ANSI images in the aforementioned collection which might conceivably offend some people, so please do not download the pack if you are likely to be offended by these images, are under 18, etc.)

Is ANSI Art "Fine Art?". Probably not. Several fine arts institutions have actually recognized ASCII Art, a distant cousin, as worthy of curatorial respect, but never ANSI, which is likened more to digital folk art - a provisional form that had too many limitations - both technical and those resulting from the uneven design training of its artists - to make it acceptable to the digital art critic or a wider circle of enthusiasts beyond those using the systems in which it was embedded. One factor that keeps it a surpressed, or at least largely unknown digital art genre is the fact that few of the pre-Web BBS's are still running, nor are there any legitimate efforts to memorialize these systems in the same way that there are multiple efforts to memorialize the Web in projects such as the Internet Archive. Computer historians, however, see that ANSI Art tells us a lot about the state of pre-Web culture in the early 1990's - a world of BBS's, 14.Kpbs modem, and SYSOPs. Embedded in its clunky, boxy screens is a concrete representation of a common, widely-shared online experience likely to provoke a measurable shock of recognition for those using these systems in those days.

For more on ANSI Art, see History of the Underground Scene: ANSI Art, available at: http://leo.ice.org/ansi/ansiexp.html

(Note: acknowledgements need to be made to Morbus, the mysteriously influential webmaster of disobey.com, who introduced me to ANSI Art several years ago. I've been wanting to write something about the genre for some time, but never quite got around to it until now.)