Digital Archeology: Early Internet Service Provider Branding in The Netherlands
Browsing the early internet brought with it a sense of wonder, exploring an endless wealth of information and entertainment we more or less take for granted nowadays. Of course, which browser you used defined your experience quite a bit. While there were similar components to 'chrome' between browsers, such as the address bar, each browser carried their own identity and branding.
Something curious happened early in the millennium. At the height of the browser wars, Microsoft let Internet Service Providers (ISPs) apply their branding to Microsoft's browser software, Internet Explorer. This would append 'provided by Your Name Here' to the browser's title bar, and replace the colourful loading indicator ('throbber') with the ISP's own animations.
Reading Jamie Zawinski's post on the Netscape browser 'throbber' and associated collection, I remembered my younger self had collected quite a few such 'throbbers' for early ISPs in The Netherlands. Naturally, I had to dig it up.
Happily, I managed to recover the files. Most of these originally had timestamps from 2001 and 2002, but at this point, it is hard to gauge when these were actually set. That is, I'm not sure whether these reflect time of install or time of copy.
The animation had each of the frames appearing subsequently in a long vertical 256 colour 'Windows' bitmap file. The frame sizes were square, either 22×22 or 38×38 pixels depending on the browser toolbar size setting. To present the images below, I used ImageMagick to split the files into frames, then FFmpeg to make animated gifs out of them.
Please enjoy the little wave of nostalgia below!
12MOVE
Compuserve
Freeler
Het Net
MSN
Packard Bell
Tiscali
Vizzavi
Wannadoo (variant 1)
Wannadoo (variant 2)
Wannadoo (variant 3)
Wish
World On-Line
Zonnet (variant 1)
Zonnet (variant 2)
Even my own high school had their own browser branding. The system administrator must have had some fun designing their own browser throbber, compressing the school's logo into the small footprint Microsoft Internet Explorer allowed for. Of course, it's quite nostalgic to me, so I thought it fitting to end the post with this.
