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If you remember the “old web”, you remember those hand-crafted HTML webpages. Part of the design aesthetic that they all shared, were these 88 x 31 pixel mini-banners. Their origin is shrouded in mist, but it is theorized that they started as buttons to link back to GeoCities, though other timelines put the infamous and oft-parodied “Netscape NOW” button as the first to appear.

It is therefore no surprise that the prolific page builders on GeoCities ran with the format at created a slew of ‘buttons’ for their own use and amusement. Corporations followed suit, and the small graphical buttons got two functions. Most of the corporate ones used to link to useful software (“Get Acrobat!”), or as part of some ritualised tribal warfare to show allegiance to either Netscape (the aforementioned “Netscape NOW” button) or Internet Explorer (“Best viewed with Internet Explorer!”).

Many ‘fan-made’ buttons upped the ante, either promoting one thing or decrying something else: “This page is anti Apple, get an IBM!”

Soon every webring (remember those?) and even individual website or even sections on a website had their own button that you could use in your own pages to link to them (sometimes triggering heated debates of whether ‘hotlinking’ was ethically permissible).

No wonder then that GeoCities had a large variety of buttons sprinkled across its pages. booters[Bad username or site: kolektiva @ social] has scraped the pages still available through the archive that was created before GeoCities was taken offline, and you can see all of this creativity on display (though it is by no means the only archive of 88×31 pixel buttons). Nostalgia until your eyes bleed.