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Pretty Good Hat

Microsoft.com in 1994

It’s approximately the twentieth anniversary of the Microsoft “home page”, as we called these things at the time,1 and a team has recreated that original site after some digital spelunking. One of the fascinating parts of the story is that there’s no solid record of exactly when the site was launched or what circa-1993/1994 web technologies were used.

There’s a not-at-all secret easter egg tucked into the code:

<HTML>
  <TITLE>Welcome to Microsoft</TITLE>
  <!-- To read more about the re-creation of the 1994 Microsoft.com homepage, see readme.html -->
  <BODY BGCOLOR="#C1C1C1">
    <H1>Welcome to Microsoft's World Wide Web Server!</H1>
    <H2>Where do you want to go today?</H2>
    <P>If your browser doesn't support images, we have a <A HREF="1994-links.html">text</A> menu as well.</P>

And the linked readme.html describes the effort, including details about the pre-client-side image map, and a cool personal note from one of the developers: “It’s a big story with many turns and it makes you thankful for all the people (and companies) who have sought to make the web great.”


  1. OMG, that means I’ve been making my own tiny web pages for twenty years. ↩︎