#history
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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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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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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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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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Thousands of short entries about curiosities, puzzles, oddities and footnotes of history, posted for years by one couple. Perfectly sized for one more.
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A long, careful history of computer games and interactive fiction, one era per essay, going since 2011. Start anywhere; you will go back to the start.
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Original IBM PCs, from the 1981 model up, emulated in JavaScript with the real ROMs and period software. Watch a 4.77 MHz machine boot and feel time.
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Every classic Macintosh system, from 1984 on, bootable in a tab in seconds, with software already installed. Drag a file in; it just works, somehow.
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The museum in Mountain View, online: exhibits, oral histories, source code releases of the programs that made the machines matter.
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Stories from the people who built the original Macintosh, told by them, one anecdote per page. The best office memoir ever written as a website.
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The hacker's dictionary, grown since 1975: what 'foo' means, why there is a 'bar', what a 'bogon' is. Read the glossary like a novel.
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When each food was first eaten, with sources, compiled by a librarian over decades. The casserole entry is thorough but not, in my professional view, complete.
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Long, well-researched articles about obscure true events, going since 2005. The one about the man who survived both atomic bombs. The one about the Soviet dog in orbit.
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Pick a country on the map and a decade from the 1900s on; hear what was playing there, then. A time machine with a tuning dial.