Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

[dandelany]

Wow, this website in particular was extremely formative for me. I was 10 in '97 and I was so excited about Pathfinder. I remember asking my librarian about it, who showed me how to use the library computers to access "the Internet" and look up the images it sent back. I think this was the first time I really appreciated the power of the web, and I've never looked back. Almost got a little emotional seeing this page still plugging along, now that I'm more than a decade into my career as a developer :)

[fogleman]

Ditto. I remember looking at Pathfinder images on a computer in the town library in 1997. I was in 10th grade.

[abecedarius]

I worked at JPL at the time, and the mission was a pretty big deal there too. TV trucks in the parking lot for days. A long line outside to get your Hot Wheels toy rover. (I guess that would've gone under the employee merchandise link on this page, which is broken now.)

[halotrope]

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast.

One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates of the landing page in the long run.

[nxc18]

Its not a single page application though. That really hurts usability. As a user I want to load the entire web application up front, then deal with JavaScript loading nonsense constantly.

Why should big powerful servers do the work when I have my battery constrained smartphone/laptop to do the heavy lifting?

[nothrabannosir]

Haha. But is it? I'm having a very hard time reading this on a phone. The text is too small and when I zoom in (unlike on desktop) it doesn't reflow.

I don't understand this "no css is best css" trope.. this is unusable on mobile.

(Explicit note of the obvious which should go without saying: not a criticism of the page. Just about this HN meme of revering css-less pages. )

[bshimmin]

Amazing what you could achieve with Adobe PageMill!

[jordache]

you are wrong. They've skipped out on parallax scrolling. So obviously there was a finite budget.

[leeoniya]

you can make the site look 2017 and still work at incredible 2005 speeds by just sprinkling some CSS3

[brudgers]

People forget that web pages require maintenance. This is a great example of the benefits that come from keeping plenty of spare HTML on hand. Though I hate think about the cost of to taxpayers of a <p> in 1997...and the </p> tags? Well that's just plain over engineering. Oh wait, it's Nasa.

[OtterCoder]

This is brilliant! "Virtual Reality models and animations galore!"

Quite a slice of history. It's amazing how much the internet has become gentrified since the days when a plain hypertext document sufficed for one of the biggest space agencies in the world.

[olliej]

Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write <a href="blah">"

[t1c1]

High Resolution model (~1800 KB)

[mhandley]

Too bad it's not running on the original webserver:

  Trying 54.230.79.254...
  Connected to d2cj35nmzi9erd.cloudfront.net.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  HEAD / HTTP/1.0

  HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
  Server: CloudFront
  Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:34:50 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 551
  Connection: close
  X-Cache: Error from cloudfront
  Via: 1.1 5a907351331cc8f5ed11d0a2d0f249d6.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
  X-Amz-Cf-Id: FJ6dusWopHeZOLLWVpHp__EdWDJcdTSufhQ3E8rVveg-3rAku1Gdzg==

[stephen82]

Yeah, they are on AmasonS3; I have just tested it myself:

        curl -vI mars.nasa.gov
	* Rebuilt URL to: mars.nasa.gov/
	*   Trying 52.222.171.112...
	* Connected to mars.nasa.gov (52.222.171.112) port 80 (#0)
	> HEAD / HTTP/1.1
	> Host: mars.nasa.gov
	> User-Agent: curl/7.50.1
	> Accept: */*
	> 
	< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
	HTTP/1.1 200 OK
	< Content-Type: text/html
	Content-Type: text/html
	< Content-Length: 93833
	Content-Length: 93833
	< Connection: keep-alive
	Connection: keep-alive
	< Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:45:05 GMT
	Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:45:05 GMT
	< Cache-Control: max-age=60
	Cache-Control: max-age=60
	< Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:44:07 GMT
	Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:44:07 GMT
	< ETag: "e21cacedb2a8c984fac76d84cd8549a7"
	ETag: "e21cacedb2a8c984fac76d84cd8549a7"
	< Server: AmazonS3
	Server: AmazonS3
	< X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront
	X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront
	< Via: 1.1 09a9032b8291da9155abd9dd1a5a360e.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
	Via: 1.1 09a9032b8291da9155abd9dd1a5a360e.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
	< X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVDCFvz6IzsBDzJIbzL8fA7fG2MVIyydpNKP1Kkk1mr6Oh0dqYIVKQ==
	X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVDCFvz6IzsBDzJIbzL8fA7fG2MVIyydpNKP1Kkk1mr6Oh0dqYIVKQ==

        < 
	* Connection #0 to host mars.nasa.gov left intact

[ckcortright]

I love the link to the "all text" version.

[dragonfruit]

Open it on lynx using your terminal. It rocks!

[erbo]

And now Pathfinder is just sitting there, waiting for Mark Watney to come along and salvage it to use to contact Earth...

[amiga-workbench]

Look at those fantastic loading times, and its not pulling down 1.2mb of cancerscript to make some text appear!

[samsonradu]

Responsive website ahead of its time

[mo17i]

Excellent UI/UX for a 1997 website! I wonder if they changed at some point.

[biofox]

Having checking archive.org it seems not to have changed.

NASA's main site from 1997 also has a nice interface:

https://web.archive.org/web/19970711085416/http://www.nasa.g...

[olliej]

omg, "3d models"!! VRML!!!!! Truly this is a wonder of the era

[augbot]

Wow, great stuff and the site was last updated on my birthday! lol.. Talk about a fun gift from the past.. :-)

[eponeponepon]

Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears.

I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total transience over tiny, tiny timescales.

[elihu]

I agree it's a shame that static content is more ephemeral than it should be, but I also worry about dynamic content and how the whole experience of using the web isn't snapshot-able. For instance, I can't really go back and browse the front page of Reddit, or look at Google News or just search the Internet of ten years ago.

In fifty years, it's going to be really hard to explain to people who weren't there what it was like to use the web in it's early days. We'll have lots of archived data from that time, but the experience can't be re-created.

[sametmax]

It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.

[bluedino]

>> Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch

You would if it was on a streaming service. How many times have you watched something on Amazon/NetFlix and go back to watch it at a later date and it's unavailable?