v0.1c
November 23, 2023
Relive the glory days of yesteryear with WEB1999: a
simulation of the Web browsing experience circa the turn of the third
millennium in the palm of your hand on your TI-82 Advanced, TI-83
Premium CE, or TI-84+ CE calculator!
WEB1999 is a non-interactive screensaver-style program
inspired by Rob Manuel’s
“Realistic Internet Simulator” (first published in 2002), where
assorted pop-up advertisements appear onscreen and the player’s goal is
to close them. This program adapts and extends the concept to
commemorate recognizable aspects of the Web experience between the years
1999 and 2001 (rather than only including a few generic “spammy” pop-up
styles as in the original) and automates the activity of moving the
cursor and interacting with windows so the “game” effectively plays
itself.
To match the experience of the “Realistic Internet Simulator,”
viewers are encouraged to hum the tune of Wagner’s “Ride of the
Valkyries” while observing WEB1999 in action.
WEB1999 runs on Texas Instruments “CE” graphing
calculators only- ones with color screens, an eZ80 processor and support
for running machine code. At the time of writing, this includes the
TI-84 Plus CE(-T), TI-83 Premium CE and the Python variants of each. For
calculators with OS version 5.5.1 or later, arTIfiCE is required.
As with any other assembly program, transfer WEB1999.8xp
to a calculator using a tool such as TI Connect CE or ticalc.link, then launch the program
from the PRGM menu or using your
favorite shell. A copy of the C
libraries must also be present on the calculator, but the program
will display a message if the required libraries are missing.
After starting the program, press any key to exit.
WEB1999 is © 2023 Peter Marheine, provided under the
terms of a 2-clause BSD license which grants permission to make
unlimited copies of it as long as credit is given to the original
author. Some of the image assets included are provided under a different
license that forbids commercial use. See the included LICENSE file for details.
This program was developed with version 11.2 of the CE tools available from https://github.com/CE-Programming/toolchain/releases/tag/v11.2. Refer to its Getting Started documentation for setup instructions.
Running make gfx all should be sufficient to build
WEB1999.8xp, after setting up the toolchain. For testing
some visual aspects of the program, make testvis will
instead build the program W9TESTV which steps through
different window kinds via the left and right arrow keys.
The visual design and choices of pop-up window contents are intended to reproduce the feel of various web pages and advertisements that were in existence around the year 2000, as they might have been experienced on a home computer of the era. No single item is a precise copy of any real web page, but the designs are built for reasonable verisimilitude to the era.
Window decorations and background color are based on the default styles of Windows 95, 98, and Me which remained available as the “Classic Theme” in later versions until Windows 8 removed it as a standard option.
For efficiency reasons, most programs for CE calculators use a 256-color paletteized display mode that allows display of up to 256 colors from among the approximately 32768 colors that can be represented by the screen. This coincides nicely with the same palette-size limitation that applied to many mid-90s PCs, for which web designers often limited themselves to a 216-color “web-safe” palette.
WEB1999 limits itself only to the basic 216-color
web-safe palette plus the 16-color “Windows VGA” palette included in the
HTML
3.2 specification which assigns each of those colors a standard
human-readable name. A very small number of additional colors are
included as “system” colors which are used to display the window
decorations.
In 2023 as in 1999, untrustworthy advertisements for “adult” services are not uncommon, especially on web pages with questionably-legal topics. This pop-up attempts to entice the viewer with an image that fails to load correctly but presumably would be of a titillating nature, encouraging them to use an unspecified service to contact “hot singles” for activities which are circumspectly described as “chatting.”
The placeholder icon used to represent an image that failed to load correctly in this window is the one used by Netscape Navigator, which by 1999 was probably still in use in some places but was rapidly being displaced by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). IE used an icon containing a small red ‘x’ symbol instead, so this window uses the Netscape icon because it is more visually interesting and iconic.
The text “HOT SINGLES” is styled to appear as if the text is on fire, accentuating the assertion that the claimed singles are hot. This style of text decoration is reminiscent of WordArt, a feature of Microsoft Office since the early 1990s that was often used by people looking to add additional flavor to otherwise unremarkable blocks of text and has seen greatly reduced application since the 90s.
Dragonball Oasis is inspired by early anime fansites of the sort that proliferated on free web hosts like GeoCities. This fake fansite borrows the name from a real Dragon Ball Z fansite that existed at geocities.com/animedg/; though that name wasn’t used until sometime later than 2001, it seems broadly representative of the approach many fansites of this kind would have used toward naming.
Dragon Ball Z reached broad English-speaking popularity at least as early as 1999, and that popularity continued for years. Given its large fanbase, a Dragon Ball fansite seems highly representative of what eager young fans might have been doing with their time around 1999.
The rainbow-colored text used to write “Dragonball Z” here reflects
how many enthusiastic amateurs of the sort who would create anime
fansites like this one would often have more technical ability than good
sense in regard to legibility, choosing to use highly-stylized text or
apply various effects that make things more difficult to read but are
more eye-catching. Other examples of this pattern are the (non-standard
and long-deprecated) HTML blink and marquee
tags.
This site also appears to be part of a Dragon Ball-related webring. Webrings were common in the mid-90s when search engines tended to be unreliable or slow: a “ringmaster” would organize a ring that acted like a directory of sites with similar topics, and users could traverse the ring to discover new sites with the same subject matter.
This is an adaptation of Despair Inc’s “Mistakes” demotivational poster. This particular design was on sale via Despair’s web site at least as early as April 1999. Despair’s products generally parody Successories’ motivational posters, and in turn Despair’s “Demotivators” later spawned the “demotivational poster” genre of Internet memes.
A dialog seeming to provide a link to download a .exe file of about 4 megabytes in size which seemingly purports to be a copy of Linkin Park’s song “Crawling,” first released in October 2000. The window title “LimeWire” refers to the peer-to-peer application of the same name first released in May of that year which was widely used to illegally share pirated music.
On close inspection, savvy viewers will notice that a .exe file probably does not contain music and is instead a program meant to run on a Windows computer: this reflects that peer-to-peer networks often (historically and still in 2023) contain items that purport to be something that a user might want to download but that are actually malware of some kind.
In the 1999-2001 period it’s likely that Internet users engaged in media piracy would have used Napster instead (which reached its peak in early 2001 and was forced to cease operations only a few months later), but it seems that malware would have been relatively rare on the Napster network. Later, LimeWire in particular was shown to be particularly hazardous: PC Pro magazine’s September 2008 issue found that around 30% of files randomly sampled from the LimeWire network contained malware.
This pop-up is an adaptation of the web cartoon “Strong Bad Sings”, published sometime in 2000 on the Homestar Runner website. Homestar Runner was (and is) a site featuring cartoons created by Mike and Matt Chapman that was first put online early in 2000 which reached significant popularity and public awareness by 2006.
Although Strong Bad Sings itself was online in 2000, it
probably wasn’t well-known at the time. However, it is included in
WEB1999 for several reasons:
The slogan “Got Milk?” was created in 1993 as the core of an advertising campaign funded by milk processors intended to encourage consumption of milk products. It achieved extremely high consumer awareness (with more than 90% of consumers being aware of it in the United States according to the campaign’s managers) and was often used in milk advertising until 2014, after that continuing to appear but in more limited scope.
America Online (AOL) was one of the largest online service providers beginning in the early 90s and lasting in that form until 2009. They became notorious for direct marketing in which they sent disks (first floppy disks, later CDs) to potential subscribers which promised generous free trials to new users. At one time, 50% of global CD production was AOL CDs!
The promotional CDs often included prominent numbers like “1175 hours free!”, with fine print noting that the offered free connection time was over some limited period. In the example of 1175 hours (nearly 49 days), that limit was 50 days so getting maximum value out of that free trial would involve tying up a phone line for weeks on end. The ubiquity of AOL discs eventually led to broad antipathy among the public especially with regard to the perceived wastefulness of manufacturing and shipping millions of unwanted CDs.
Dubious claims of a user being the one millionth visitor to a given web page (or some other large, round number) were a common entrypoint for scams seeking to collect personal information from unsuspecting Web users. This one seems to imply that the user has won a car.
It’s also reminiscent of hit counters that were found on some web pages throughout the 1990s (especially those run by individuals) that incremented a user-visible counter on the page for every page load. A scam like this might have been more appealing to its victims at the time when hit counters were relatively common, compared to their effectively complete disappearance after the turn of the millennium.
This encouragement for the user to take some kind of personality test is representative of a perennial kind of Web sludge proffering pseudo-psychological evaluations that are popular with users and can easily be used to collect user information for purposes of later advertising (such as sending them spam emails).
The Star Wars theme for this popup (referring to droids and featuring an image of R2-D2) points to Episode I - The Phantom Menace which was released in theaters in May of 1999 amid huge public interest. The specific concept for a personality test to answer the question of what kind of droid a person might be was inspired by a poll on the front page of starwars.com as of August 15, 2000 which asked what kind of droid the site’s readers most needed.
A screen image from the 1989 video game Zero Wing, which had a notoriously poor English translation from the original Japanese. Versions of this screen as a meme first appeared on some message boards in late 1998, and by early 2001 it had become big enough to gain attention from traditional media outlets. The phrase “all your base are belong to us” remains a well-known meme as of 2023.
This is a simplified version of the ticalc.org homepage circa 1999. As of late 2023, ticalc still uses the same basic visual design that was introduced in early 2000, so it seemed important to take an older version to make it visually distinct from the modern version of the site.
ticalc.org remains an important TI programming community hub in 2023, although its importance seems to have been on a downward trend over recent years; this window acknowledges its long history.
This screen is not a pop-up window, and is only displayed in specific cases. This text was shown by Windows 95 (possibly later versions as well) on computers that lacked the ability to power off under software control. Although by 1999 it seems likely that most computers would have been able to power off through software commands, this screen enhances the feeling of using a Windows 95 or 98 PC.
Advanced Power Management (APM) specified the earliest standard way to control computer power in software, appearing in 1992 and being fairly well-supported by 1996 (when “version 1.0” of APM support was added to Linux). The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) was specified late in 1996 and was supported by Windows 98, but even in late 1998 ACPI was still considered fairly unreliable on some systems. Near-universal adoption of ACPI probably didn’t come until around 2004 when most Linux 2.6-based distributions enabled ACPI support by default. Given these, it seems likely that a typical home computer around 1999 would have supported at least power-off by APM and possibly ACPI but this screen is included despite that because it’s more fun.