The Most Interesting Post You’ll See For (the Rest of) the Year

Somehow I ended up on a site called “The Wayback Machine.” Have you heard of this? It looks like someone brilliantly took the initiative back in 1996 to start archiving what seems to be 95% of the web’s content, from that point on.

Case in point… cyberadam.net, a website I ran my freshman year of college. I assumed it was long dead, long gone. Every now and then I wonder what exactly it looked like, how I arranged things, etc., but I deleted everything when I got tired of running it. Turns out someone saved a backup.

Remember the state of the web in 1996? I don’t either. I’m pretty sure I first came online in 1997 or 1998. Obviously things have changed since then, I just have a hard time remembering exactly how much. Remember “shockwave,” Flash’s predecessor? This university’s website made me laugh out loud a little. The primary text on the website says:

[Our] web site is highly graphical, with the intention of making it easier to navigate. Each main area, and many of the detail areas contain image maps, that is, areas of a graphic that are links to the detail information. Simply place your mouse cursor over the desired topic, click the mouse button, and you will be sent to the appropriate page.

I know things weren’t yet second nature but it’s still just funny to me.

Facebook.com was, until mid-2005, the home of an “intranet directory software solution,” until late 2005 when the site we all know and love either acquired the name or had dibs on it when the previous owner’s contract expired.

Collegehumor.com looked much different in 2001.

Residual payments for streaming online media wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye’s of networks like NBC and Comedy Central, though Comedy Central appears to have pioneered the whole thing by allowing visitors to refresh a page in order to see the latest “screen grab.” I wonder if that was for “promotional use?”

Blogging was still new and didn’t really emerge until late 1998, early 1999. LiveJournal apparently didn’t have an editor, as their main page came complete with tpyos. Xanga looks like it beat del.icio.us to the whole online bookmark thing before it morphed into “The Easiest Way to Publish Online! It’s called Weblogging,” the site says, bolding the phrase like a new vocabulary word in elementary text books, “and you’re going to love it.”

And what do you know?  We did!

Then again, some sites never change.