The Old Web, Still Standing
Sites from the first internet that never closed, and the people keeping the lights on.
- Survivors (13)
Still up. Still exactly like that. - Archives & Museums (10)
Where the rest of it went. - The Revival (9)
New personal web, built on purpose.
Sort: newest · weirdest · most followed · A–Z
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A community for people making personal websites, with guides, events and a directory of members' sites. Friendly to beginners by policy.
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A Norwegian shop whose homepage is every product at once, at every size, in every direction. Maximalism before the word; you will feel seasick and come back.
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A multi-hour documentary about bulletin board systems, the dial-up world before the web, with the companion site still up. Free to watch; worth every modem noise.
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One of the richest companies on earth has a homepage that looks like a 1997 text file and I have never been happier with a website. No complaints. Logging it as a complaint anyway, for the record: it is too good.
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One HTML file, hundreds of stylesheets, each a different website. The 2003 demonstration that design is a layer. Still the best argument for learning CSS.
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A presidential campaign website from 1996, still served. The campaign ended; the page did not. Read it for the layout, not the policy.
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A preservation project for web games and animations from the Flash era and beyond: tens of thousands of titles, playable through a launcher.
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A tiny text-first protocol for a smaller web: no scripts, no tracking, one font. Needs its own browser, which is part of the point.
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GeoCities restored neighborhood by neighborhood: Area51, Heartland, SiliconValley, Tokyo. Browse the way it was meant to be browsed, by street.
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The Internet Archive's search engine for GeoCities animated GIFs. Search 'under construction'. Search 'dancing'. Search anything; the results spin.
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The Flash cartoon site that defined a decade of bedroom animation, still updating now and then, playable again through Ruffle. Email the strong one.
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Own your words, publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere. A wiki and a movement; the thinking behind a lot of the revival.
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A UK car-leasing business whose site is a riot of animated GIFs, marquees, and a proprietor who wants you to know she is in charge. Sincerely commercial and sincerely unhinged.
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A magazine served from a solar-powered computer; the site goes offline when the weather is bad. Finding: the most honest uptime graph on the internet.
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A newer free host for personal sites with a small, active neighborhood and a strong feeling of 2003.
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Free hosting for hand-made websites, built in GeoCities' memory and now bigger than most people expect. Nuxtre's closest cousin; go say hello.
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A hundred works of internet art from 1984 on, restored and explained. Pages that were weird on purpose, by people who did it first.
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The portal where amateur Flash games and cartoons were born in the late nineties; it never left, and now runs the old ones in an emulator.
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Screenshots of GeoCities pages, one at a time, posted for years. A research project that became a slow, endless slideshow of what people put online first.
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A volunteer mirror of GeoCities pages, saved in 2009 before the lights went out. Navigation still works. Hit counters do not.
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Thousands of industrial, educational and amateur films from the twentieth century, free to watch and reuse. The source of half the stock footage you have ever seen cut into something strange.
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A free shell account on a community UNIX system running since 1987. Log in with a terminal, make a homepage, talk to people on 'com'. The oldest neighborhood still taking residents.
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The promotional site for a 1996 film, kept online by its studio in its original form: tiled star background, planets for navigation, 'Jam Central'. The reference specimen of the species.
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A social network that looks and works like 2006: top friends, profile songs, a layout you can break with CSS on purpose.
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Thousands of text files from the BBS era: manuals, rants, stories, phreaking, ASCII art. The pre-web, kept exactly as it was typed.
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A million pixels sold for a dollar each in 2005, as a student's tuition plan. The grid is still up; most of the links behind it are not, which makes it a map of the dead web too.
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Type a URL, pick a year, see the page as it was. The internet's memory. Everything else in this category depends on it.
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The 2014 tilde that restarted the idea: one server, many ~users, pages written in a terminal.
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A shared UNIX computer where members get a shell, a ~homepage and a town to be nice in. Applications read by humans.
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Screenshots of famous sites by year, 1991 onward, with timelines of how each changed. The Arcade's own history pages borrow its framing.
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One image, one sound, one line of text, looping. The 2004 format that proved a joke only needs three ingredients. Still looping.
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You can do anything at Zombo.com. The only limit is yourself. Welcome. A 1999 Flash loop, rebuilt in HTML5 so the welcome never has to end.