This is what online life looked like in the 1990's and early 2000's. Before “Web 2.0” and back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark.
Remember HotBot.com?
It was one of the web's most popular early search engines. The above picture is the page on December 10th, 1997. This particular webpage is forever burned into my brain because it was always on my fourth grade teacher's computer desktop (she was far too busy searching stuff on here to actually teach us anything, sadly).
But what about people who weren't so fortunate as I was—people who didn't get regular exposure the nexuses of the old internet? And what about people who were born in more recent times, who always thought that the current infrastructure of the web looked the way it does today?
A project called "The Wayback Machine" created by The Internet Archive has the answer to these questions. The Internet Archive was founded in 1996. Their mission was to, essentially, catalog the Internet like one might catalog a library. Or, in their words to offer "permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format" and to prevent "the Internet...and other 'born-digital' materials from disappearing into the past."
What other sites have been preserved in history? And what did today's current mega-behemoths look like in their awkward phase? Let's take a look!
Yahoo.com (12/28/1996)
Geocities.com (4/13/1997)
AOL.com (4/21/1997)
