Since the birth of the Internet (more than 25 years ago), websites have undergone thousands of changes and their development has come a long way thanks to rapidly advancing technology. It’s already difficult to remember what websites looked like in the past, but the early versions of many well-known resources were completely different. Let's take a look at them.
View before and now
1. Google.com: started in 1996
Search engine Google system, founded in 1996 as a class project by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is today the largest company in the world. The first screenshot shows one of the earliest options appearance Google, and on the second - modern design:
2. Facebook.com: started in 2004
8 years after Google, Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University. Known as TheFacebook, the project was initially available only to fellow Harvard students. Today, the attendance of this social network is 1.71 billion active users per month.
3. MySpace.com: started in 2003
Before Facebook came along, MySpace was a popular social networking site. It is one of the first social networks, but it has already been supplanted from its leading position by sites such as Twitter and Facebook. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for $580 million from founders Chris DeWulf and Tom Anderson. After MySpace began to rapidly lose its audience, Murdoch reportedly sold it for $35 million, calling the purchase a “huge mistake.”
4. Yahoo.com: started in 1994
In early 1994, Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang created a portal called Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web, a directory of other websites. Later that year the site was renamed Yahoo!.
There are several versions of the origin of this name. Some argue that Yahoo! is an acronym for the phrase " Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." Others believe that the name was borrowed from the book “Gulliver’s Travels” by D. Swift, where the word “yahoo” refers to rude humanoid creatures. By the way, it is the second version that the company’s founders call the correct one.
5. YouTube.com: started in 2005
6. Wikipedia.org: started in 2001
The massive online encyclopedia Wikipedia has forever changed the way we obtain information for generations. And although Wikipedia has changed little in terms of appearance since its launch in 2001, during this time it has grown greatly: there are already more than 30 million articles on the site.
7. MSN.com: launched in 1995
MSN (Microsoft Network) was launched in 1995. In the early 2000s, MSN was the second most popular Internet service provider (after AOL LLC). The msn.com website itself is a news portal with videos, promotions and polls.
8. Apple.com: launched in 1997
The current look of the Apple website is radically different from its early version with a tempting offer to get a free CD-ROM. However, even then the company demonstrated its love for the color white. And the Apple eMate 300, advertised on the right side of the page, was at one time a popular PDA (from 1997 to 1998).
9. Twitter.com: started in 2006
Twitter was launched in March 2006 and, compared to its old version, became almost unrecognizable. Twitter is currently one of the top ten most visited sites in the world and is considered one of the most successful startups of all time in terms of market capitalization.
10. eBay.com (formerly known as AuctionWeb): Launched in 1995
Who would have thought that this drab, unremarkable site would turn into the largest online auction site in the world? Its founder, programmer Pierre Omidyar, initially wanted to register Domain name EchoBay.com, but, as it turned out, it was already owned by one gold mining company, so it was decided to shorten the name to eBay.com.
11. LinkedIn.com: started in 2003
LinkedIn was created in 2003 by entrepreneur Reed Hoffman and was positioned as social network to search and establish business contacts. In the United States alone there are 93 million users of this network. From the very beginning, the site has a rather complex structure.
12. Amazon.com: launched in 1995
Initially, Amazon only sold books. When coming up with the name for his project, Jeff Bezos looked through the dictionary and settled on the word “Amazon”, since the Amazon is exotic, different and the largest river in the world. This is exactly what he wanted to make his store.
It is also interesting that earlier, in September 1994, Bezos acquired the domain Relentless.com and planned to call his brainchild the word Relentless (Russian. merciless, tireless), but his friends told him that such a name sounded a little sinister. The domain still belongs to Bezos - it redirects to Amazon.com.
13. Instagram.com: started in 2010
The now popular Instagram site began its existence under the name Burbn. The creators of the project, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, at some point realized that their service was beginning to closely resemble Foursquare, and decided to make it more specialized, focusing on mobile photography. This is how Instagram was born. The name is a combination of two expressions - “ instant camera" And " telegram».
Since then, the project has been recognized as one of the most successful in the world. In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion.
All of the above resources today already have a completely different design, and you can find out what these sites looked like before only thanks to the preserved screenshots. But there are some sites that have been preserved in their original form! If one screenshot isn't enough for you and you want to have a real '90s-style surfing experience, take a look at the list below.
Work sites in the style of the 90s
At the time of publication of this article, all sites are working.
14. Space Jam: started in 1996
A funny piece of history: the Space Jam subsite of warnerbros.com, which has remained unchanged since its launch in 1996. Here you can follow the links and feel like you have traveled in time!
15. MillionDollarHomepage.com: launched in 2005
This site brought its creator, 21-year-old student from the UK Alex Tew, earnings of $1,037,100. The main page has a size of 1000 × 1000 = 1 million pixels. Each pixel was sold for $1, and the minimum purchase size was a 10x10 pixel block. The buyer had at his disposal the area that he bought - he could place a picture on it and make a link from it.
The goal of the site author was to sell all the pixels, therefore, the earnings should have been $1 million. But Alex Tew earned a little more, since he auctioned the last thousand pixels on eBay, earning $38,100 from the sale. The site view is saved for history and is available for viewing.
16. DPGraph.com: started in 1997
Website software for mathematical and physical 3D visualization. Here, not only the theme is striking, but also the appearance of the page - animated gifs of volumetric graphs, painted in all the colors of the rainbow, and a design in the style of the 90s - what could be more psychedelic?…
17. Aliweb.com: launched in 1993
ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the WEB) - one of the first search engines in the world. Its launch took place in November 1993. Fortunately, 23 years later we have the opportunity to admire such a rarity in its untouched form.
18. Taco.com: launched in 1997
« We don't sell tacos. We don't make tacos. Truth be told, some of us don't even like them that much.", - said on one of the pages of the website taco.com, owned by a company that offers various computer help. The name TACO comes from the abbreviation T technical A dvisors Co mpany. This site from the 90s still shines thanks to the sense of humor of its system administrators.
19. IFindIt.com: started in 1995
I Find It is a huge guide to searching the Internet. Year of creation - 1995. The website contains advice: “ Please set your screen resolution to 800x600 for optimal viewing experience»…
Google, where were you in 1995? Apparently he was also playing with rattles.
20. Instanet.com: started in 1995
If HTML pages 2.0 (the version approved as a standard on September 22, 1995) could be sold at auction, then instanet.com would now be worth millions. Just take a look at this source code:
They say progress cannot be stopped. Months and years pass, technologies become better and more perfect, you won’t surprise anyone with mobile phone with satellite navigation. And the Internet allows us to communicate in real time while being on opposite ends of the planet. Time flies so quickly that sometimes we do not notice significant changes in many of the things we deal with. This also applies to the Internet, in which the development network protocols, standards and technologies simply transformed the appearance and functionality of existing sites. In this material, I invite you to lift the veil of time and look into the past, see what the site looked like before, what the appearance and functionality of the resources were like in those years, and perhaps this will help you understand how far we have stepped forward in the development of digital technologies of our days .
So, what did the site look like in the past, and what tools can help us look into the web history of 5-10 years ago? More than 20 years ago, in 1996, enthusiast Cale Brewster founded a digital archive called The Internet Archive, whose slogan was “Universal Access to Knowledge.” Since that time, this archive has been collecting and storing copies of web pages, graphics, audio and video, and various programs, providing free access to the accumulated information for everyone.
As of October 2016, the archive already had 15 petabytes of information, and the project’s web archive already contained more than 150 billion web pages of various sites.
It is thanks to this archive that today we have the opportunity to see what many resources looked like 10-15-20 years ago. The history of actions on your computer can be found in what I wrote earlier.
Let's see what the site was like before
So, how can you view saved copies of sites? Let's take advantage of the opportunities of this project and try to lift the veils of time.
Go to this service (it’s called the Wayback Machine), enter the address of the site you are interested in in the search bar (for example, www.youtube.com) and click on the “Browse history” button on the right.
The system will process the request and give you the result. At the top there will be a breakdown by year, and you will see in which year the activity of this site was first tracked and a snapshot of it was taken.
Click, for example, on the earliest year (in the case of YouTube, this is 2005), the full calendar of that year by month will be displayed below. The days when “snapshots” of the site were taken will be highlighted in bluish color; in our case, the first “snapshot” was taken on April 28 of this year.
Accordingly, you can browse any of the sites that interest you.
You can also work with this service directly by entering in the address bar of your browser:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://url the desired site
For example:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://google.com
Accordingly, by entering this line in the address bar of your browser and clicking on enter, you will immediately be taken to a display of snapshots of the site you need by year, month and day.
Let's see what the sites looked like before
With the help of the archive.org resource, anyone can access billions of pages of saved web content, literally watching over the days, months and years how the appearance of many popular resources has changed. Seeing with our own eyes how the visual component of the network has developed, we can clearly understand what a leap Internet technology has made over the years, and what a great time of technological progress we are lucky enough to live in.
In contact with
Custom VKontakte pages, including yours personal profile, often change under the influence of certain factors. In this regard, it becomes current topic viewing an early look of the page, and this requires using third-party tools.
The first thing to note is that viewing an early copy of a page, be it an existing or already deleted user account, is possible only when the privacy settings do not restrict the operation of search engines. Otherwise, third-party sites, including search engines themselves, cannot cache the data for later display.
Method 1: Google Search
The most well-known search engines, having access to certain VKontakte pages, are able to save a copy of the profile in their database. At the same time, the lifespan of the last copy is very limited, right up to the moment rescan profile.
Note: We will only affect Google search, but similar web services require the same steps.
- Use one of our instructions to find the desired user in the Google system.
- Among the results presented, find the one you need and click on the arrow icon located under the main link.
- From the drop-down list, select "Saved Copy".
- You will then be redirected to the person's page, which looks exactly like the last scan.
Even if you have active VKontakte authorization in your browser, when viewing a saved copy you will anonymous user. If you try to log in, you will encounter an error or the system will automatically redirect you to the original site.
You can only view the information that is loaded along with the page. That is, for example, you will not be able to view subscribers or photos, including due to the lack of authorization.
Using this method is not practical in cases where you need to find a saved copy of a very popular user's page. This is due to the fact that such accounts are often visited by third parties and therefore are much more actively updated by search engines.
Method 2: Internet Archive
Unlike search engines, a web archive does not impose requirements on the user page and its settings. However, not all pages are saved on this resource, but only those that were added to the database manually.
- After opening the resource from the link above, in the main text field, paste the full URL of the page you want to view a copy of.
- If the search is successful, you will be presented with a timeline with all saved copies in chronological order.
Note: The less popular the profile owner is, the lower the number of copies found will be.
- Switch to the desired time zone by clicking on the appropriate year.
- Using the calendar, find the date you are interested in and hover your mouse over it. In this case, only numbers highlighted in a certain color are clickable.
- From the list "Snapshot" select the desired time by clicking on the link with it.
- You will now be presented with the user's page, but only English language.
You can only view information that was not hidden by privacy settings at the time it was archived. Any buttons and other features of the site will be unavailable.
The main negative factor of this method is that any information on the page, with the exception of manually entered data, is presented in English. You can avoid this problem by using the following service.
Method 3: Web Archive
This site is a less popular analogue of the previous resource, but it copes with its task more than well. In addition, you can always use this web archive if the previously reviewed site is temporarily unavailable for some reason.
- Opening home page website, fill in the main search bar with your profile link and click the button "Find".
- After this, a field will appear under the search form "Results", where all found copies of the page will be presented.
- On the list "Other dates" Select the column with the desired year and click on the name of the month.
- Using the calendar, click on one of the numbers found.
- Once the download is complete, you will be presented with a user profile corresponding to the selected date.
- As in the previous method, all capabilities of the site, except for directly viewing information, will be blocked. However, this time the content is completely translated into Russian.
Note: There are many similar services on the network, adapted for different languages.
You can also refer to another article on our website that talks about the possibility viewing deleted pages. We are finishing this method and an article, since the material presented is more than enough to view an early version of the VKontakte page.
Sometimes you want to remember those times when dinosaurs roamed the Internet, and one song took 10 minutes to load. Let's look into the past and feel nostalgic, thanks for this to the online service: Wayback Machine - Internet Archive. It has been operating since 1996, during which time it has collected more than 279 billion web pages in its database.
Follow the link: http://archive.org/web/web.php Enter in the line: the address of the site of interest and click “Browse History”. The system will display the entire history for a specific portal.
Dates are circled in blue circles on the calendar backup copies. We select the desired year, date and look into the past of the web page.
Virtual website hosting for popular CMS:
Where to see what website pages looked like over the years.
Yandex At this time, he opened the first remote office in St. Petersburg, launched Yandex.traffic and “dictionaries”. And mail.ru began to use a search engine on its portal. In a year, Yandex will buy mobile software developer Smartcom and social media. network "My Circle". He will launch “Calendars”, the blog service Ya.ru, the Yandex.Mirror portal and open a school of data analysis - a free educational course.
Google launch calendar, finance and translator. Open free hosting Picasa images and announce the acquisition of YouTube. In 2007 the company will install the largest system solar panels(It currently powers 30% of offices) and will announce the arrival of Android. And employees are starting to ride around offices on gBikes.
Story Facebook unique. Only in 2004 the service went beyond the walls of Harvard, and already in 2008 it grew so much that the number of users exceeded 50 million people, and Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune was already estimated at 1.5 billion. dollars.
What our site used to look like.
This is how our website has changed since 2006.
