Beta

Credit 00

This sheet prints on one A4 or Letter page without the site around it: use your browser’s Print command. The teacher’s notes under the sheet are not printed. Pupils need The Early Web Hall open to answer.

Eracade Era Museum · Worksheet 4 of 8

The Early Web Hall, 1997–2004

NameDate

Read the Early Web Hall (about twenty minutes), then answer in your own words.

  1. What was the web-safe palette, and how many colours did it have?

  2. A modem gave about five kilobytes a second. Roughly how long did a 200-kilobyte game take to arrive?

  3. Why did many early browser games need a plugin or an applet?

  4. Why did some browser games say “click here first”?

  5. While someone was online with a dial-up modem, what could nobody else in the house do?

Look closely

Turn the volume down, then use the Dial-up sound room with the transcript open. List the phases in order. Which one sounds like static, and what is it really doing?

Make your own

Design a loading screen for a game that takes thirty seconds to arrive. Draw it in the box. What would keep a player watching instead of closing the page?

Printed from eracade.com/museum/hall/early-web/

For teachers: where each answer is in the hall
  1. The glass: 216 colours handed out as advice so images would not turn to mush on 256-colour monitors.
  2. Small is the style: about forty seconds, “most of a minute”.
  3. Plugins and applets: the browser could not run a real game by itself at first.
  4. The input: the game had to claim keyboard focus, or the arrow keys scrolled the page.
  5. The room: ring the house, because the phone line was in use.

The look-closely and make-your-own tasks have no single right answer. Ask pupils to explain their choice in one sentence.