These ad banners, released in February 1997, were a collaboration between the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and First Virtual Holdings, which had one of the first payment systems on the net. These advertised Bell Atlantic (renamed in 2000 to Verizon) and its super-fast 128k ISDN service (obviously it was a long time ago).

Bell Atlantic ISDN — “Surfing” (February 1997)

This uses “flocking” surfboards to visually show the increased speed and responsiveness of the faster Internet connection (versus 28.8k and 56k, the other two main options at the time). It only loads 12k of compiled Java to display the initial animation.

If you click the “Order Now” button, you can see the full forms interface I also built in Java, which is an additional 34k.

Bell Atlantic ISDN — “Mouse Maze”

This one is also 12k of compiled Java, and I had streamlined the forms interface to a single class with 19k of code.

TOM DOT COM corporate logo

I made this in 1998 as a logo for my former site, tom.com, which I later sold to Li Ka-Shing, the Hong Kong billionaire, for his aspiring web portal, back in 1999. It is only 8k of compiled Java, and used the full framework we ended up building:

• ML-based functional language, called VDP
• Compiled down into a Java-based opcode graphics engine, what I called a “nanokernel”, since it only shipped opcodes it needed

How these are running

These are the original 1997 Java 1.1 applets — the very same .class bytecode that shipped 29 years ago.

They are running on CheerpJ, a complete Java virtual machine compiled to WebAssembly.