@mint @MisterRogersSnapped

> Keyboard looks like a normal late 90s/early 2000s one to me,

Maybe a mid-2000s. Definitely not what people used in the 90s. Those retarded app buttons didn't appear until USB keyboards took off, and even though it supported USB out of the box, Windows 98 and ME machines used PS/2 keyboards, at least on the popular models; I was still using an XT keyboard. (BIOS didn't support USB keyboards; until Windows had fully booted--if it did boot and you didn't have to fix it or press a key to let it run scandisk.exe or whatever--the keyboard was dead. You had to either have two keyboards or just use a PS/2 one. People just used a PS/2 one.) It was weird when the gumdrop iMacs came out and they were USB-only. There were no extra stupid "internet" buttons until a few years after USB keyboards became popular: in the 90s, people were upset that there was a "Windows" key.

> avatars and profile info started getting traction at around the same time

People had sites, almost no one had web-based forums. It was more like bulletin boards. Think 4chan but with flat files instead of a DB and Perl scripts instead of PHP. Most of the time, you didn't even log in: it was just a website, who gives a shit? Auth was just like on IRC: type a name, that's you, that's your name.

You can *sorta* see it start when MySpace started letting people post comments on other people's pages, but that was the mid-aughts, not the 90s.

The relative timestamps took off around the time Twitter started doing them. People printed web pages out to read later.

> phpBB supported it

There were practically zero phpBB sites until the mid-aughts. If you want to try actually using it, you might have to grab an extremely old copy of Slackware or something but apparently user registration worked as of https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/commit/9eff7725089a105db853f2aed81370a3abee8d69 .

> the rest are more of an anachronistic nitpick.

The guy is using basically a modern webapp with shitty retro aesthetics. It was seriously different back then. All of this tiny stuff adds up to something completely different.

This is what shit looked like in the 90s: https://web.archive.org/web/20010216010142/http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/

Here is the stuff people were using: https://web.archive.org/web/19970607141729/http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/Communications_and_Networking/BBS/ . Very few of those appear to be web-based, but this one was: https://web.archive.org/web/19970615193133/http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/demos/wwwboard/wwwboard.html . Here's this, right, the UI (or what there was of it) for replying to a post: https://web.archive.org/web/19970615232217/http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/demos/wwwboard/messages/4428.html . The tarball downloads won't work (he made it a form; many such cases) but if you click the individual files, they apparently were archived: https://web.archive.org/web/19970615192857/http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/wwwboard.shtml#Downloading . (Actually it is kind of hilarious and maybe I will try to install it on a VM at some point.)

> AJAX hasn't started getting traction until mid-2000s.

AJAX didn't exist. "DHTML" became a buzzword but it was basically unheard-of that you'd have some persistent connections the whole time.

This guy was the state of the art: https://web.archive.org/web/19970222021204/http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ . Everyone read that guy at the time. https://web.archive.org/web/19990424152203fw_/http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/sucker.html . Dude considered gifs to be bloat. The entire web looked like Craigslist back then, except that people would just put their email address and phone number directly on a page; web saturation was so low that there wasn't much money in spam, so no one was scraping pages looking for email addresses.