Websites

In 1996, the Internet Archive began archiving the web for a service called the Wayback Machine. They’ve now archived 55 billion web pages. That’s enough web pages that if you were to print them all out using your roommate’s printer while he was at class and tape them end-to-end, you could reach the moon and back 28 trillion times.

I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine’s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. They viewed the medium as a chance for inexpensive advertising and invested dozens upon dozens of dollars into it. The results are tremendously humiliating.

It wouldn’t be right talking about websites from the 90s that had “-Resources.com” in the title without talking about CGI-Resources.com – another one man operation which was run my another famous Matt, Matt Wright. CGI-Resources was THE website to visit once your you had matured past the geocities free hosting phase, and wanted to add some power to your pages (namely cgi scripts). Matt also…

Another website that was hosted by “Russell Handorf” aka Satanklawz.

Satanklawz hosts all the servers, and does mostly all the technical stuff.

Title:	Chief of Security
Joined Badmotherfucker:	7/26/00
Sex:	A Man
Age:	2/19/80
Hometown:	Memphis, TN

The Philadelphia 2600 was set up to gather people with a common intrest to represent a stereotyped culture, share knowledge, and have a good time. Everybody at the meetings has something to teach, no matter how new to computers, and everybody has something to learn, no matter how experienced. We ask everyone to keep an open mind at the meetings because even within our group there is diversity. The Philadelphia 2600 was set up for anybody with any electronic and computer intrest, not just “Hackers”. If you’re a graphic artist, come on down. If you’re a cable repair guy, come on down. If you’re a 10 year old midget with a 2X4 for a leg, come on down. If you’re a police officer or government official, you’re welcome too. As for everyone else, you’ll always find someone who’s willing to teach new members and this is the perfect place to do it.

This site was one of Russell Handorf’s old websites from 2001.  He went by satanklawz.

Old GeoCities homepage 1998 Another service you may have likely gravitated to as a webmaster in the 1990s, after experimenting with your free AOL home page a bit, was Geocities. In fact, many of us fossils had our first websites hosted there, after all, Geocities offered up to 10 megs of free space to host your site in one of their communities! So what community…

Old Lycos search engine 1996

Website hit/visitor counters were huge.

Old Yahoo search engine