01 / THEN
An applet from the early interactive web
The recovered official 1999 page identifies this as Black Jack v2.0, a Java 1.1 applet with a $500 opening bank. The applet, original HTML, fallback screenshot, and GIF artwork now survive in the project archive.
Modern browsers no longer run Java applets. This edition recreates the playable experience with standard browser technology while keeping the historical record separate.
Internal file timestamps inside the recovered jcombjack.jar date the card artwork to January 10, 1996 — days before Java 1.0's public release on January 23, 1996 — with a table and button refresh in April 1997 and this "Version 2" rebuild finished in May 1999. The 1999 page also carried a badge linking to JARS.com, the Java Applet Rating Service, one of the era's leading directories for Java applets.