I came across a post on digg today that showed what Google was like back in 1998, when it was in beta. It felt strange looking at how it looked 9 years ago and looking at it now, the design hasn’t changed much but the company has grown massively. However, this post isn’t about Google, it is about a service called Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive.
To use it you simply input a URL and it will return you a list of archived pages in certain years from 1996 to the present day, obviously not every site is archived but the main ones are (about 2 billion pages archived) and it is funny looking back at sites like Microsoft back in 1996 (here), BBC (here), and eBay (here), and how they have changed in the years of their service. Take a look at the screenshots below:
Boring and dull Microsoft Homepage – 22nd October 1996
A much better looking Microsoft Homepage – 25th March 2007
Digg
Frontpage attempt Digg Homepage – 9th December 2004
A bit more colourful Digg Homepage – 25th March 2007
I’ve shown you a few sites, now it’s time for you to have some fun, to access the WayBack Machine go to: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php, and input a URL and start to look back on the good old days of the dot com boom.
Simon North
