October 15, 2001

10:03 PM

The Wayback Machine.Explore Metafilter and Blogger from October 1999. Search Google in 1998 or read Salon in 1997. Visit Word, Yahoo, c|net, Feed, Crashsite, Cool Site of the Day, Village Voice, and NYTimes from 1996. Congratulate Mathowie on his new job in 1997, see Kottke's redesign from October 1999, Glassdog's 3-D logos from 1997, and Zeldman's pages optimized for Netscape 3.0. (Unsurprisingly, Jakob's site hasn't changed much since 1996.) Surf the past and share your greatest nostalgic finds.
posted by waxpancake (34 comments total)

Cool! My snowman is still there!

I miss my snowman.
posted by joemaller at 10:08 PM on October 15, 2001

sniff...I miss Word.
posted by lheiskell at 10:18 PM on October 15, 2001

oh my god, you can't put anything behind you, can you?! wow. that's great. i'm so embarassed!
posted by palegirl at 10:43 PM on October 15, 2001

This is a really fascinating link.

With the web medium, the content tends to be permanent. The web's a great medium for archiving information. But the design is transient. Major sites have facelifts every couple of months, and we're quick to forget what the site was like without the fresh new look and usability enhancements. The Wayback machine archives the design of the web as well as the content. Fascinating.

(humble reminder: self-linking is still not appropriate)
posted by ktheory at 10:58 PM on October 15, 2001

Oh my God. My loving tribute to my car is still floating around out there. : )
posted by SisterHavana at 10:58 PM on October 15, 2001

Sweet! This is amazing!

Thank you, Mister or Missus Wax Pan Cake.
posted by Succa at 11:16 PM on October 15, 2001

ktheory, self-linking within a thread is sometimes appropriate. per the guidelines: "(note: it's ok to link to your own things as comments in threads, if it adds to the discussion..."
posted by gluechunk at 11:20 PM on October 15, 2001

Wonder how big their database must be.
posted by riffola at 11:25 PM on October 15, 2001

For a REAL timewarp, look at the original Yahoo! pages from 1994, back when it was hosted on the Standford Web servers. Formated for your Mosaic browser!

How innocent it all seemed...
posted by Down10 at 11:28 PM on October 15, 2001

Oh my god, they have my cute 'n fuzzy bunny design from mid-1997. This is the coolest thing ever.
posted by mathowie at 11:35 PM on October 15, 2001

> ktheory, self-linking within a thread is sometimes appropriate.

And in this case, self-linking is absolutely encouraged, I'd say.
posted by sylloge at 11:39 PM on October 15, 2001

Ev's first evhead (1998) has the tagline "web profitizing"
posted by mathowie at 11:45 PM on October 15, 2001

It's not archived, but in '97 it seems I had an interest in the Oprah Winfrey show and attractive women on MSNBC. Some things never change.
posted by owillis at 11:56 PM on October 15, 2001

What can you say?!
posted by MiguelCardoso at 12:31 AM on October 16, 2001

One thing is for certain, that's just a hell of a nice snowman.
posted by dong_resin at 12:47 AM on October 16, 2001

Sweet Jebus, my college website is hidden away in there in all its orange-and-periwinkle-on-black splendor. Mercifully, the epilepsy-inducing animated GIFs are nowhere to be seen....
posted by youhas at 12:56 AM on October 16, 2001

Disinfo from around 1999
posted by klint at 1:08 AM on October 16, 2001

What a trip. There's the first draft of my first personal page in there, but not the final working version. *laugh* Also, the first page I ever contracted to design, a Seattle helicopter company that I believe no longer exists. (the domain's not resolving anymore anyway) The animated helicopter at the top was CUTTING EDGE! *laugh*
posted by Nothing at 2:32 AM on October 16, 2001

Justin Hall's site from December, 1996

It's not the changes in design that are all that notable, but rather, what he was talking about. If he only knew what a commercialized piece of bile the web would become...

Not that I'm bitter, of course.
posted by lizardboy at 3:21 AM on October 16, 2001

Is it just my bad luck or how come URL's with tilda's in them (ie: mostly user pages like www.whatever.com/~whoever) return results stored in the database, but can not be retrieved?
posted by aki at 3:43 AM on October 16, 2001

Three gold stars for your homework this week, waxpancake.
posted by lucien at 4:57 AM on October 16, 2001

What was Zeldman thinking when he used that pink?!
posted by eoz at 5:40 AM on October 16, 2001

Damn, I was hoping they'd have an archive of my first web page to get publicized in book form - actually, it might be there, someone else was having problems pulling up a tilde'd page as well.
posted by tpoh.org at 6:27 AM on October 16, 2001

> Wonder how big their database must be.
> posted by riffola at 11:25 PM PST on October 15

I think they're up to the 100 terabyte range.
posted by CarlMalamud at 7:41 AM on October 16, 2001

Bother! I can't seem to connect. And I'd been hoping for ages that they'd make the archive available over the web.
posted by moss at 9:01 AM on October 16, 2001

I can't connect either, but then again I'm searching for tripe and piffle (my stuff).

My stuff, as you may be aware, is not "A-List" material.

A-List! A-List! Roswell! Roswell!

:-P
posted by ethmar at 9:42 AM on October 16, 2001

My stuff, as you may be aware, is not "A-List" material.

So much in fact, that I got the following response:

Sorry, no matches.

Roswell! Roswell!
posted by ethmar at 10:17 AM on October 16, 2001

Hilarious. I love this. Here's my original ticket into the professional web world in 1997, an (ugly) compilation of Pacific Northwest Media websites that I'd been building for a couple years. I used it to convince my employer that A) I knew what I was doing and B) to let me take over their website (it worked). I get a kick out of my bizarre attempt at an obfuscated counter (upper left corner), and my 'best viewed in' tag for IE 3.

Also fun - what MSNBC.com looked like when I joined in early 1997 (remember the long ladder of alternating stories?).
posted by kokogiak at 11:17 AM on October 16, 2001

Good grief! I got one hit for one of my sites, and I've been waiting for a half hour for the page to load! How is everyone cruising through this database when I'm on a T1 for cry-yi? Baaandwidth....baaaandwidth for the poor...
posted by ethmar at 11:25 AM on October 16, 2001

Ethmar, if you're on a long wait, try stopping/reloading your page again - seemed to work for me.
posted by kokogiak at 11:28 AM on October 16, 2001

I don't think bandwidth the problem. I'd imagine that most of the archived material is compressed somehow and it probably takes a while to address and decompress the HTML, images, etc. There is a lot of CPU intensive stuff for their server to do -- sometimes it is unusably slow, but it seems to pick up now and again. Stopping and reloading worked for me too, but only sometimes. Lots of waiting.
posted by sylloge at 3:49 PM on October 16, 2001

Whew!

A friend had some legal action a while back which involved the removal of personally harassing content from a website. (I can't get any more specific.) I checked, it looks like they didn't get it.

I'm sure they'd remove it under the circumstances, but it's good my friend won't have to go through any of that again ....
posted by dhartung at 4:18 PM on October 16, 2001

doh.. they didn't archive my bright green page (my first one) from my members.aol.com days.
posted by lotsofno at 6:04 PM on October 16, 2001

I finally managed to connect to it. It didn't have an archive of PBOT. That was the only thing I wanted.

*cries*
posted by moss at 10:37 PM on October 17, 2001