If you’re old enough to remember, you might recall using internet browsers like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, searching for sites on Alta Vista or the embryonic Google to find horrifically basic web pages. If you’ve ever wanted to take yourself back there, or just experience it for the first time, now you can.
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‘Archive’ sites such as Wayback Machine and Old Web Today let you see how individual sites looked like, from a simulated browser of your choice. With Old Web Today, these browsers run on their respective operating systems: classic Mac, Windows, and Linux.
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Using Old Web Today, you enter the URL you want to see and a specific date, and the site will pull up the archived version of the site closest to your chosen date. By doing this you can see Google whilst it was on Stanford’s servers, and Facebook when it was known as ‘TheFacebook.’
It’s all horribly slow, as it was then, all extremely low byte, as it was then, and generally unpleasant to navigate through. But saying that, there’s also a genuinely comforting nostalgic element to it, no doubt as it brings back memories of who you were and where you were when you were confronted with these web pages back then.
Maybe don’t delve too much down the retro internet rabbit hole though, remember, the internet is probably the thing that’s keeping you unemployed. Stay away from the deep web as well while you’re at it.
