Bostonist is patiently awaiting our first birthday. It'll be upon us when the temperatures are, gasp, way colder than they are today. As we wait, there is something of a milestone being celebrated elsewhere on the Boston web right now. Boston.com turned ten years old. Geeks and Academics alike may remember the web back when Lynx was the best browser available and only navigated around using text, quite fine when connecting with that fancy Hayes 2400 modem. Netscape came on the scene with it's first few incarnations showing Bostonist a world through images that loaded line by line on our screens. Soon the browser wars would begin with Netscape 2.0 and the release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0. This is all still pre-Google and when Windows 3.1 was the slickest OS on the market. Boston.com, however, became the Boston Globe's home on the web that year, 1995.
Boston.com is celebrating it's 10th birthday prompting Bostonist to grab Mr. Peabody and take a ride in the Way Back Machine. Of course we’re only looking at Boston.com as it existed. They’re not showing you their frontpage but rather have created a whole, non-exhaustive, timeline of the last ten years.
The first jump back is to 1996:
In 1996:
The mid-nineties brought a whole host of colors, individually placed buttons, and ever expanding disjointed content to the Boston.com site. Not only a link to the Boston Globe, Boston.com provided also linked readers to offer support to WBUR’s fall fundraiser (2005 edition is now playing).
In 2000:
Boston.com had developed the look and feel of a newspaper read, much like the nytimes.com site has today. A link list occupied the left quarter page, ads were creeping into the top bar and right hand side. The pages seemed to be creeping into the dynamic world wide web. That moved forward with technology.
In 2005:
Here and now, a big flashy box greets visitors with breaking news and sports, and a graphic representing Boston’s very own weather beacon giving you the forecast.
What’s been the same for Boston.com? The logo. Over the last ten years it’s been riding the wave the whole time, simple type face on a curved line. Today that wave has a birthday banner flowing on it too. But we’re not complaining, we’re just going to go play a little bit of Lobstah Bash. Yeah, and anyone know where Bostonist can get one of those Boston.com foam fingers?
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