Whether you were too young & missed out on the mid-1990s explosion on the world wide web, or are in the mood to take a nostalgic surf down memory lane, this is a site I highly recommend: The Way Back Machine.org. I had no idea this place existed - and a search of our boards also drew a blank. It comes via a WSJ online report entitled, “Not Fade Away – Lawyers’ Delight: Old Web Material Doesn’t Disappear”. This is one of those sites I added to my Favorites folder the second after I got there.
Apparently borrowing a name from the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show’s WABAC machine, this site has been taking & archiving snap shots of web pages on the Internet. With over 40 billion web pages from 1996 to search through, there’s an awful lot of stuff here to keep you busy.
You think that old personal page you made with those grainy naked pictures is a forever lost bit of electrons? Think again. The ‘Way Back Machine’ may have saved it for your (and others) viewing pleasure. I wish I could remember my old AOL screen name, getting another look at that crappy hometown page I made back in '99 would be bring back an awful lot of memories (or would that be a lot of awful memories).
Anyway, how many of you remember back to 12/96 when allmusic.com looked like this?
Or in 1997, when the IMDB looked like this -or- ars later when it transformed into [?
How about [url=http://web.archive.org/web/19991127092624/http://www.livejournal.com/]Live Journal](]this[/url) from 11/99? (The still have that sheep)
That’s a just a couple Cafe Society-like sites that came to my head - but I have a strong suspicion my fellow dopers will want to link more exciting & memorable pages from yesteryear. Bear in mind, you have to recall the pages via address, their site doesn’t run text searches. (To save you the time looking, the SDMB site owner blocks robots.txt, so their homeage isn’t archived. I think it goes without saying, but in the interest of starving the trolls, please don’t link any extinct snark pages).
So check it out & share. Tell us, do you have any favorite old sites you thought were lost forever - or have changed so much we wouldn’t recognize them.