The early internet is breaking - here’s how the World Wide Web from the 90s on will be saved

The early web looked different than it does today. In the 1990s, the internet was intimate and a bit amateur. Websites were made by everyday people on their personal computers, desktops, with very minimal knowledge of coding or HTML needed.

Software becomes obsolete — Flash which made much of the early web run, will be shut down in 2020.

People stop paying for domain names.

Companies like Netscape or GeoCities or MySpace that host websites and online communities go out of business, or get sold (to Yahoo! for example).

The internet is not forever, it can break and disappear.

Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied are part of a growing group of people who preserve and archive our online digital history. They see the web from the 90s and 2000s as an artifact, at times, even, Net Art.

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[hotseventyfive]

2005: be careful what you put in the internet, it’ll be there forever

2019:

[ChristianJiang]

2:23 Dragon, but with an “A”
Me: Wait, “Dragon” already has an “A”!

[renee]

“Then they got to each other”

Oh my god they were roommates

[gkv]

Brings back nostalgic memories from 2007 when I first used internet. Everything has changed so much.

[Luischocolatier]

I remember this website I used to access when I was a little kid, like 5 or 6 years old. It was called something like Serena1 and it had little flash games with gifs, all of them with holiday or vacation themes like Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Summer... You usually had cities to build and you did that by picking from the gifs on the lower half of the srceen and dragging them up to the upper half, arranging them how you wanted. I especially loved the Halloween city.

I tried to look for it a couple years ago, but it had disappeared.

[OneyButtwillies]

Im a constant and avid web archivist, and knowing there are people like me saving rare things from the deep pits of the internet is so relieving and amazingly helpful. Like if something goes down, theres always a chance a datahoarder out there has what youre looking for.

[silverlve]

I had a Geocities webpage for a few years! Ah memories.

[yachiyow]

That's what my first project website looked like on programming class 😂. A gif background with Undertale background music.

Doing HTML in notepad.😂

[leandrobarcellos]

this is so cool and nostalgic
(and sad, in some aspects)

[cheesecakefox]

I remember so many fan-made *NSYNC, TLC, Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears Fan Pages I would visit way back then. I miss how colorful the webpages used to be. The creators put allot of time and effort into their pages and it is considered history and most of all... ART.

[hanawana]

I always find old history, gardening and gossip blogs

So personalised

[izaicslinux]

Gopher protocol kinda reminds me of the original web. Although it's missing the old graphics since it's goal is to display documents instead of webpages.

[strawberrylemonadelioness]

It's sad that Yahoo basically just hit the delete button on a huge amount of history.

[nirui.o]

In the 90s, the Internet was like a independent country. Everything is so chaos, vibrant and personal. Today, you are bound to few companies that put their rules in front their users.

The most sad thing is, people has forgotten that they are creators, and they don't need someone grant them that title.

[pepsijazz]

So much from the 90's and early 2000's internet culture has been lost.

[yussefjeber]

Preserve 90s Internet for the sake of the future of vaporwave aesthetics

[BvousBrainSystems]

Of all the videos sponsored by Squarespace, they really should have sponsored this one

[hasztagpuasko]

the conclusion is - Yahoo destroys the internet. First they bought geocities to close it down and then tumblr to ruin it~

[WarpedBlinds]

The old internet was more personal. Today's internet just feels like a giant ad :/

[kaibaCorpHQ]

That's what I hate about FaceBook the most today, I hated FB back then for it, and I still hate it for it today (and other numerous privacy reasons aswell more recently); FB was stale, it was white and blue, and no personality, Myspace was the opposite of that, so customizable and yet uniform is what won out.