Internet Archaeology

Do you remember the first time you went on the internet, meaning the www? I was thinking about this the other day, and I came to the rather sad conclusion that I remember it no clearly than the first time I saw TV. Maybe there are people who recall exactly which site it was, and when they did it, and the sense of wow and awe and everything else, but for me it seems to have been something of a non-event. Ditto email. Here, I can only remember impossibly long and unmemorable email addresses composed mainly of digits. It all seemed a dreadful faff compared to picking up a phone.

This must have been mid-90s at some point, although I have no idea whether it was '95 or '96, or even '94. I suspect '95, as I'm pretty sure that by the time I came to Germany, I even had an email address on my business card. Anyway, it was over 20 years ago, that's for sure.

Although I was probably 'early majority' rather than 'early adopter', I do have a pang of nostalgia for those early days. From a design point of view, the last-century websites already have an Olde Worlde charm - just take a look at some of these, including TheFacebook, Ask Jeeves, AT&T and Yahoo!

Even more fascinating are the 'antiquated websites that still exist in their natural state' - for these, have a look at the wonderful collection on 404pagefound  . It's a great name for a great site, started in 2009 by Tim Katlic and dedicated to the survivors of Web 1.0 - news sites, games, graphics, academic sites, all in their blue hyperlink, Comic Sans, black background glory!

The number of websites leapt from around 100,000 in 1996 to around 1m in 1997, and I'm grateful to Mr Katlic for his work in excavating some of those still active.

I do wonder what websites will look like in 20 years, if they still exist. Will we be talking about a post-internet world already?