Internet circa 1996

By Ilya Kochanov
Contributor, [GAS]

As early as 10 years ago the web was a terribly unproductive place to be. Animated GIFs were all the rage and HTML ruled supreme. Forget about funny cat videos or managing your calendar online. Blogging? Shopping? Material of questionable origins? No, no, and unfortunately not.

Web 2.0 is a common buzz-word for sites which provide cool services; but do you remember what Web 0.5 was like? Apparently a service called the “WayBack Machine” has been archiving web pages since 1996 and is used simply by typing in a desired web address. Give it a try for yourself and see what you can dig up. They’ve archived about 55 billion pages thus far so finding something cool is easy.

The outcome is pretty funny considering modern sites such as those of Microsoft or Apple appear as if they were created in a middle school computer class.

It’s interesting how just over a decade ago we viewed these monstrosities as state-of-the-art developments in human communication. Now they are fossilized remnants of a different age, immortalized in history along with dial-up, Arpanet, and Rick Astley.

Internet ’96