[blakesterz]

  "The burden of the Web on a Linux server was tested by creating a working Web site on a i386-33 Linux machine. During a 40 day span, the PSU Linux WWW received 5375 requests from 1328 different sites around the world. This is an average of 6.9 requests per hour and 165 per day. The Web requests never interfered with any work being done by other users at the machine. A Linux system can easily provide Web services and have horsepower to spare."

I love reading all the mid-late 90s articles on the web. I guess I'm old enough to say I'm "re-reading" all of this now. I can still remember the first time I saw an animated gif! That damn thing was like magic. This article was bullish, I really love the old ones that say things like "this is a fad"!

[commandlinefan]

I was actually surprised that Linux was mature enough that it had a "journal" dedicated to it when the web was new - my memory is hazy, but if I'd had to guess, I would have guessed that the web actually predated linux. I was definitely already pretty familiar with the world-wide web before I had heard of Linux.

[kristopolous]

It does predate Linux but it's more complicated. Think about Linux Journal at the time as more "Linux newsletter". "The Web" was initially on OpenStep and commercial Unixes like HP-UX, Irix and SunOS.

It was becoming dominant at that time amidst its siblings like gopher, uucp, archie, netnews, etc but still was pretty new.

Here's a hype video from DEC about the web in early 1994 for example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-1l6aBgX5UY

That browser is NCSA mosaic btw and I presume that's running Tru64. 1994 was still very much the era of educating people, even professionals, about the WWW

[sodapopcan]

In case those who aren't as old as us are confused, "animated gif" is not a redundant term. There was a time when static gifs were just as common as animated ones, if not more so!

:upsidedown-face:

(definitely for sure more-so if you include spacer.gif)

[interfixus]

More so. Mid-nineties web static images were either jpg og gif. Preferably gifs, which mostly compressed way better for anything but photos. With proper indexing, color limitation, dithering, bitcount, and vigilant observance of proper websafe color palette you could shave amazing extra kilobytes off precious bandwith. Animations were for Geocities.

[ogurechny]

Even worse, GIF was not intended to be just an “animated image format”, it was “general purpose media streaming format” which incorporated frames/layers, sequence ordering, palette switches, and compression (also, one couldn't be sure that client hardware can decode and paint even a single frame fast enough).

Some old picture book or presentation type GIF files have 0 delay time between frames (doesn't work well with software of later decades, when GIF animations became common), and 0 is “draw as soon as possible” in the specification. Even a simple viewer program without support for metadata or user interaction would have to wait for each frame to be received via modem link, and it would take some time, especially for full screen images. Therefore, a competent GIF viewer software should have an option to simulate 1200 baud download for those old files, and compute the additional delay based on frame size in bytes.

[anthk]

https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html

Enjoy.

[Nux]

Gosh, most of those pages are so fast to load and so readable.

[jks]

I remember reading a weekly newsletter (perhaps in email but probably on Usenet) that listed all the best new websites that had been set up. One week such-and-such university's law school had set up a site that listed their state's laws (but for the full text you still had to go to the library). I can't remember what it was called - it could have been Jerry and David's Guide, which became Yahoo, but all snapshots that I can find look more like an attempt at a comprehensive hierarchical list than a weekly "what's new".