Weekly Link Dump - Retro Edition

BY: NICK IANNITTI  |  Weekly Link Dump

In the back of our minds, we all know the Web has come a long way since its early days, but too seldom do we get a chance to actually relive the experience of surfing as it was in the mid-nineties. If, during the regular course of your day, you find yourself constantly seized by paralyzing grips of nostalgia, your productivity steadily dropping as the death of the net’s “golden age” weighs heavy on your heart, then I sumbit to you a humble solution.

The Internet Archive has been working hard to capture the very early days of the Web, and they’ve created The Wayback Machine, a search which allows you to enter a URL, and see what sensational things it was doing five, ten, or twelve year ago.

I do warn you, however, things may not quite be as you remember…efficient search was a long-distant dream, Java was just a suggestion, and animated GIFs were considered “multimedia”. It wasn’t so much a “golden age” as it was a “tiled background age.”

If you, for some reason, can’t seem to think of any URLs to plug into the search, fear not, here’s an article from someone who has spent some time travelling in 1996 (and doesn’t have too many nice things to say about it.)

Considering the web’s shaky start, we could have just collectively thrown up our hands in disgust and walked away from the Internet, saying “well, we gave it a shot.” Instead, be thankful that we’ve reached the latter half of the first decade of the 21st century unscathed.

Given the rate at which we’re progressing, we may very well make the tiled background extinct by 2010.

UPDATE: Yes, I realize that The Wayback Machine has been around for almost ten years, but, like a time capsule, certain things only have real meaning when they’re “opened” a decade or two down the road.

UPDATE 2: Um….Fuel’s site is not on there…so don’t bother looking for it…