Best of the old web

November 27, 2024 12:07 PM

Exhausted from election 2024 and tired of re-litigating the 2016 primary? Perhaps you'd enjoy re-visiting The Race for the Whitehouse 2004 or 2000 in their original web 1.0 glory. Too soon? The 1996 websites for the Dole/Kemp and Clinton/Gore campaigns are still online. Too political? Maybe you want to play Star Ship Titanic (1998) or Space Jam (1996), both preserved in high resolution 1024x768 perfection. Or relax with zombo.com (1999), spork.org (1996) and milk.com (1994). These are all reminders that Cool URI's don't change on the WWW project (1991).
posted by autopilot (15 comments total)

I forgot to mention metafilter.com (1999).
posted by autopilot at 12:15 PM on November 27 [5 favorites]

Not to mention Heaven’s Gate (1997)
posted by larrybob at 12:36 PM on November 27

This is so great.

How can I help?

(complete with Tim Berners-Lee disclaimer)

I am delighted to see these.

(Also, I have one of these! I still keep racerrecords.com around, the hand-coded website I built for my now-defunct little indie record label, which the Wayback Machine first crawled on Christmas Day, 1996.)

I love this stuff. Thank you so much for posting this fab post with these fab links, autopilot!
posted by kristi at 12:46 PM on November 27 [1 favorite]

Here's a website I made around 1998 which was basically just a portal of cool links I liked. Sadly, most are gone but a few do still respond. I am always gobsmacked that freeservers.com has continued to host it for the past 25 years, never a penny spent by me to keep the page there.
posted by AzraelBrown at 12:57 PM on November 27 [2 favorites]

Shouldn’t the metafilter.com link go here?
posted by TedW at 1:15 PM on November 27 [1 favorite]

Shouldn’t the metafilter.com link go here?

I fully was expecting that link to go here, not there!
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 1:31 PM on November 27 [1 favorite]

Just a reminder...

you can do anything you want, at Zombo.com
posted by Windopaene at 2:40 PM on November 27 [6 favorites]

I've got an old Mac SE/30 and this is the web it can still use.
posted by 1adam12 at 5:08 PM on November 27

I went looking for 2 websites I used to check regularly during the early 2000's, and both are still active and have not updated their layouts!

Action figure reviews:
http://www.mwctoys.com/

Retro video game reviews:
https://videogamecritic.com/
posted by exolstice at 5:29 PM on November 27 [2 favorites]

Still useless
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:39 PM on November 27

Somewhere I read that the best indicator of a quality site is if the URL contains "university.edu/~username/", because that is how you know it is going to combine artisanal hand-written web 1.0 styling with actual content. A good example is dlchao's psdoom (1999), which turns Doom into a process management tool for system administration.

tilde.club tries to recapture some of this aesthetic and fun of that web era (by [mefi's own] Paul Ford). tilde recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, so it is almost part of the old web by now...
posted by autopilot at 12:49 AM on November 28 [4 favorites]

I was disappointed that timecube.com is not exactly alive--only through the Internet Archive
posted by zardoz at 1:17 AM on November 28

These are so great! As someone whose professional career has been pretty much tracked by developments in web UI I love this kind of thing.

There was a site I loved to use as a fun activity when I was teaching 'confidence in using the internet' community classes back in the very early 00's. Just checked and it remains unchanged! Oh, my cockles are deeply warmed.
posted by freya_lamb at 6:58 AM on November 28

wow I just saw this post. I started doing web development in 2000, so this is deeply amusing and a total flashback.
posted by supermedusa at 10:16 AM on November 30

I was recently reminded of Planetarium, which recently celebrated its silver jubilee, a relic from a more whimsical timeline.
posted by backwoods at 8:47 PM on December 1