Browse the web as it was

The old web is not gone; it is just no longer indexed. Between the Internet Archive's crawls, a handful of mirroring projects and the people who simply never took their pages down, a surprising amount of the 1990s is still reachable — provided you know the address or the archive that holds it.

There are three different experiences here and they are worth separating. An archive gives you the page as a modern browser renders it. An emulated browser gives you the page as Netscape 3 rendered it, table layout bugs and all. And a live directory gives you pages that are still being written today in the old style — hand-coded, small, no tracking.

If you only try one thing, make it oldweb.today. Loading a 1997 homepage in a real 1997 browser is the closest anyone has got to time travel, and it makes very clear how much of what you remember was the browser rather than the page.

The list

Wayback Machineweb.archive.org Nearly a trillion archived pages going back to 1996. Paste any URL and pick a date. The calendar view is the fastest way to watch a site change decade by decade. oldweb.todayoldweb.today Archived pages rendered inside emulated period browsers — Netscape, Mosaic, early Internet Explorer — running in a container. The layout bugs, the fonts and the load behaviour are all authentic. The Old Nettheoldnet.com A proxy that strips modern pages back to what a vintage browser can render, plus a browser-based front end for the Wayback Machine. Built for people running real 90s hardware. Restorativlandrestorativland.org A browsable mirror of GeoCities organised by neighbourhood — Area51, SiliconValley, SunsetStrip — exactly as the addresses were structured before the whole thing was deleted in 2009. One Terabyte of Kilobyte Ageblog.geocities.institute A research blog that posts automated screenshots straight out of the GeoCities archive. It is the best single feed for the visual language of the amateur web. Cameron's Worldcameronsworld.net A collage assembled entirely from GeoCities pages: every animated GIF, under-construction sign and marquee tag, arranged into one scrolling monument. Neocitiesneocities.org A working successor to GeoCities: free static hosting, a built-in editor, and thousands of active hand-made sites. The browse page is a live directory of the modern small web. Wibywiby.me A search engine that indexes only lightweight, personal, hand-written pages. The 'surprise me' button is the closest thing left to clicking a random link on a 1998 web ring. textfiles.comtextfiles.com Jason Scott's archive of the text-file culture that predates the web: BBS ads, phreaking guides, ASCII art, zines. Still served over plain HTTP, which is entirely the point. Telnet BBS Guidetelnetbbsguide.com A maintained list of bulletin board systems still accepting connections today. Hundreds of them are live; a telnet client and five minutes gets you into one. tilde.clubtilde.club A shared Unix machine where members get a home directory and a ~username page, run the way university servers were run in the 90s.

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