Five Ancient Versions of Websites

The Internet's not that old. But, interestingly enough, it IS old enough to look back on and notice how old and outdated some webpages were, back in the day. So here, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, are five of the greatest examples of Digital Nostalgia. (Go try it out yourself, it's addictive!)

1. Facebook

I can remember when there wasn't Facebook. That makes me feel really old. The original design, when I first started using it, was pretty clean. They've kept that up, for the most part.

Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine only has the login page, but you can still see that is was a lot simpler back then.

2. Google

Back in the day when you still had to choose a search engine (and when Google wasn't a verb yet), I mostly used Lycos and Excite. But I gradually came around, and now most of my life is uploaded and synced with Google and their servers. Back in the day, they were just a prototype at Stanford, but still colorful.

3. Excite

I was the one kid in sixth grade who didn't get a Hotmail account. I decided to go with Excite as my search engine and webmail of choice. I remained steadfastly an Excite user until 2006, when I finally broke down and got a gmail address. No, I am not making that up. I had an Excite.com email address for more than ten years. And I still have one that's so full of spam I could sign it up for a Monty Python sketch.

The first iteration of the lame-o search engine is a classic victim of late-90s webpage design. "Let's just put everything on the front page all at once! That's easy, right?"

4. The New York Times

I never was much of a news junkie until I got to college, and then I mostly used the start page of iGoogle or Excite. It wasn't until I was actively taking journalism classes that I started getting my news directly from news sites.

The New York Times' first iteration from 1996 is hilariously bad. It looks like they half-scanned the first half of the front page and stopped there.

Note the "Please open your window to the width of this line of text" banner across the bottom.

5. 3M

And finally, an example of what corporate America was thinking about this whole Internet thing in the late 90s. I've worked for 3M, my father still works there, and I've always gotten the impression that 3M was so massively gargantuan that it takes them a long time to change directions as a company.

Their first website, launched in February of 1997, is no exception. It looks like someone who read a book on HTML got his hands on a few press releases and lumped it together into a "Website." Oh well, the net was young, and we were foolish.