Every so often, while I am indexing photography’s historical materials, I come across something I have to stop and smile at, in this case: a list of websites about photography in the 1990s. This was an interesting time because like this, much of the time you’d get a list of sites like this on paper. Sort of like when your grandfather printed out his MapQuest directions.
Published by the editors of Petersen’s Photographic in October, the single page resource reads as follows:
PERIODICALLY WE WILL BE BRINGING YOU THE LATEST ADDRESS INFORMATION FOR MANUFACTURERS AND DISTRIBUTORS ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB. BESIDES PROVIDING UP-TO-THE-MINUTE PRODUCT INFORMATION, THE INTERNET ALSO OFFERS HELPFUL PHOTO TIPS AND DETAILS ON CONTESTS, DISCOUNTS AND OTHER SPECIAL PROMOTIONS.
Cover
My question was immediately “How many of these sites have survived?” so I went ahead and checked each page, and has some interesting results.
To save you some time, I have colour coded each of the listings.
Colour Codes
BLACK – Still active (may be a redirect) as of this blog
BLUE – Broken Link
RED – My antivirus software recommended I don’t continue
PURPLE – Domain is now available
YELLOW – Repurposed/Owned By A Different Company
Links
A-M
Argus (A Korean Condo)
Beseler (Sketchy Looking Indonisian Financial Site)
Chinon (Now owned by a wine company)
Contax I didn’t colour code this one because technically it’s a broken link but that’s because the ownership is expired, and that being said it won’t be available until April 9th. Even then, someone may snatch it up.
Duracell Now owned by some casino related company, which is odd for Duracell to let this one go.
Fargo Electronics Owned by HID Card Printing Solutions
Macromedia Owned by, and redirects to Adobe now.
Minolta Funny how the Konica and Minolta links are both broken and not redirecting to Konica Minolta.
N-Z
New York Institute of Photography The once heavily advertised photo school has their domain for sale.
Norman Enterprises Up for just a pennt for the first year on Go Daddy.
Pentax Corp. Redirects to Ricoh’s Japanese site but essentially still Pentax.
PhotoDisc Redirects to Getty Images
Photo Marketing Association (PMA)
Ricoh Corp. It’s interesting to see large companies that are still in play abandon old addresses. It’s not for sale but also not being used.
Sekonic Petersen’s Photographic accidentally listed it twice, so I may as well do the same.
Feel free to surf the web like it’s 1997, but do so with caution on those red links as I did not verify whether or not they actually pose a danger. Sometimes Bitdefender gives a false positive but I wasn’t willing to test it.
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