Old graphics

The other day I was saying how we used to have a product named Spotlight many years ago. Here’s the graphic, which some of you may remember:

Just for jazz, here’s an even older graphic. It used to be at the top of the home page back when Ranchero was known by another name, back in ’95-’96.

Looking at this graphic, I suddenly remember that in those days image maps had to be done via a CGI on the server: there was no browser support yet. And that reminds me of the debates we used to have over whether it was okay to start using HTML tables yet, back before they were commonly supported.

The horror!

Also, in those days I was learning to write Java applets, because I thought they were the future of web interactivity. There was no such as thing as Shockwave or Flash yet. (What I particularly liked about Java was that applets could call back to the server without having to reload the page.) I never ended up doing much with Java, but I liked the language.

Update: I used Roaster as my Java IDE. I loved Roaster. Roaster ruled.