Ancient Web: theJANG's Old Texture Directory Points Back to Web Design in the 1990s

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

An old directory called /textures/ is exactly the kind of fossil you expect to find in a long-lived personal domain. On theJANG.com, it sits inside something more useful than a random bucket of background images: the surviving online history of a web designer who was building interfaces before "UX" became a department.

Visit the old theJANG texture directory

The texture directory itself is not reliably retrievable now, so there is no responsible way to invent a catalog of what used to be inside it. The surrounding domain, however, identifies its owner very clearly.

Bamidele O. Shangobunmi, known online as theJANG, says he entered the online world through bulletin-board systems in 1993 and built his first webpage in 1995. His biography explains that the JANG identity evolved through several aliases between 1993 and 1997 before settling into the name that still fronts the site.

His old resume is a miniature history of commercial Web development.

Shangobunmi describes himself as designing online user interfaces since 1993. During the late 1990s he worked on hand-built HTML, JavaScript, DHTML, cross-browser compatibility, and graphics at a time when supporting Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer 4 was an actual job requirement rather than a historical punishment.

At Ask Jeeves from 1999 to 2001, he worked first as a senior graphic designer and then as a site engineer. His resume credits him with homepage and search-results redesign work and with developing an ultralight Ask.com homepage of less than 5 kilobytes of HTML, down from nearly 20K, while preserving the visual design.

That sentence may cause physical pain in anyone currently waiting for a 9-megabyte marketing homepage to display three paragraphs and a button.

The personal site became a career archive

The interesting thing about theJANG.com is how much of the surrounding history still survives.

There are work samples from later interface-design jobs, descriptions of browser limitations, and personal material that spans completely different interests. His Diablo II section, for example, preserves content from his active playing years of 2000–2002 and says much of it was resurrected in 2009 for old time's sake.

That is the context that makes a path like /textures/ interesting. Texture collections were basic infrastructure for early personal-page construction. Small repeating GIFs and JPEGs could turn the browser background into marble, metal, paper, stars, stone, or something that looked like a carpet sample discovered after a chemical spill.

Try the original /textures/ path on theJANG.com

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.