In Tales of the Early Internet,"musical eroticism in the pastoral world" and eubanks winkler Mashable explores online life through 2007 — back before social media and the smartphone changed everything.
The year was 1999: Cher’s "Believe" was blasting on pop radio stations, Bill Clinton was impeached, Jar Jar Binks hit the Big Screen, and the beep, beep, static of dial-up internet echoed in family rooms across the globe.
The World Wide Web was still young then — gawky, awkward, and painfully slow. The dot-com bubble was still growing, on the cusp of bursting. The public had been using the internet for under a decade and those making online content (before we even called it content en masse) were often just throwing stuff at the wall.
"The 1990s were marked by exploring the possibilities of graphic design on the web and searching for ways how to approach web design, since at that time the vast majority of web designers only had experience with the design of printed material," Petr Kovar, the founder of the Web Design Museum, which curates online exhibits about sites from the ‘90s and early aughts, told Mashable in an email.
Many websites today look the same because there is greater "emphasis on accessibility, applicability, and UX at the expense of visual originality," Kovar said. That’s not a bad thing, added the UX designer based in Prague, but it does leave web designers from the ‘90s like him pining for colorful backgrounds and Comic Sans. Although, that aesthetic wasn't embraced by corporate brands, with many like Amazon, AOL, and AltaVista opting for box grids and just a splash of color just before the new millennium. (AOL was the most vibrant of the bunch at the time.)
While many services archive the web, like the Internet Archive with its influential Wayback Machine, Kovar organizes the historical snapshots to provide better context about the internet’s past. Want to see what porn, music, movie, and soccer websites looked like decades ago? Kovar’s museum has a sampling. The museum also has a collection of search engines from the ‘90s, many of which you’ve probably never heard of. After all, Rough Guides, the travel guidebook brand, didn’t include Google in the indexof its internet guidebook in 1999. (Yes, people wrote books for internet tourists back then.)
"The generation of internet users born after 2000 has only a very vague idea of what websites looked like in the 1990s and around the year 2000," Kovar said.
Let’s fix that. To freshen our memories and give the TikTok teens an internet history lesson, below are a selection of homepages from 1999. Some are in Kovar's collection, some I had to hunt for using the Wayback Machine. (For even more of a trip, visit the Web Design Museum directly.) You can see shades of the current Google in its 30-year-old snapshot, but Apple's is worlds away from today. And the White House homepage, yeesh.
AltaVista was the search engine my family used in the '90s. It was founded in 1995, bought by Yahoo in 2003, and then shuttered in 2013. It had strong grid energy in 1999. Credit: Web Design Museum 
Amazon had already expanded beyond books into electronics and other goods by 1999. Its homepage back then was filled with blue hyperlinks. Today, it's all slick and shiny with lots of product cards. Credit: Web Design Museum 
AOL sure loved vertical columns in 1999. It still has a homepage today, but it's filled with so many more images and video. Credit: Internet Archive 
In 1999, Apple had a "Hot News Headlines" section on its homepage. Now its homepage is all bold colors and feels like the spirit of Helvetica. Credit: Web Design Museum 
Jeeves was still around in 1999. The search engine once hosted by a cheery butler is now just called Ask.com after it got steamrolled by Google. Credit: Web Design Museum 
When's the last time you heard someone mention the metasearch engine that used to fetch answers to web queries? Like so many other homepages of 1999, Dogpile was covered in blue hyperlink. Credit: Web Design Museum 
Awww look at 4-year-old Ebay, with its funky fonts and colors. Those random capital letters are giving me extreme early internet vibes. Credit: Web Design Museum 
On a non-doodle day, Google's homepage doesn't look that drastically different from 1999. (Minus that big Beta.) Credit: Web Design MuseUM 
MSN's 1999 homepage has the same love for grids as AltaVista and so many other websites back then. Credit: Internet Archive 
Back in 1994, the Clinton Administration launched the first White House Website. By 1999, when Clinton was still in office, it looked like a sad, brown sack. Nowadays, the White House website looks like it was based off a premium Wordpress theme, and it is constantly losing links to scientific information about climate change. Credit: Internet Archive 
Yahoo bought Geocities in 1999 for $4 billion. The popular site, with its themed communities, was at one point the third most visited website on the web. RIP. Credit: Web Design Museum 
Kinokuniya to Feature Authors at L.A. Times Festival of Books
Takarabune Lecture at Japan House Los Angeles
Nina Revoyr's New Novel: 'A Student of History'
‘American Sutra’ Author Discussion at JANM
Ellie Rush Returns in ‘Grave on Grand Avenue’
‘Made in Abyss’ in Theaters March 20, 25
Screening of ‘For the Sake of the Children’ in San Diego
Reading of ‘Masao and the Bronze Nightingale’
INTO THE NEXT STAGE: Derek Shimoda’s Latest Work Is a Tale of ‘Redemption’
Screening of ‘With All My Love, From Mom’
Izumitani Short 'The Other Side' Screens Tonight at LAAPFF
‘Cherry Blossoms Odyssey’ at Japan Foundation
Cherry Blossom Festival at South Coast Botanic Garden
New Play Provides Glimpse of Life on Big Island
‘Hold These Truths’ Ends This Weekend at Coachella Valley Rep
Local Director Wins Grammy for Music Video
Keiko Matsui at McCallum Theatre
Monterey Park Cherry Blossom Festival Set for April 27
Cudos Grows Globally With Highest Profile Listing to Date on Huobi
Hilty & Bosch, Takarabune to Perform ‘Awa
Entrepreneur promotes crossMainland encourages crossBetter conditions to be created for Taiwan people to travel to mainland: spokespersonFormer leader of Taiwan's legislature visits Fujian to worship ancestorsWorld's Oldest Person, a Japanese Woman, Dies at 119China urges India to handle TaiwanVOX POPULI: Will the City of Los Angeles Ever Do the Right Thing?‘Kikan’ Screening, Q&A at JANMWomen of the Year to Be Recognized by Downtown JACL$2M Granted to Community Organizations from Santa Monica Nikkei Hall Fund Best TV deal: Save $600 on the Hisense 65 MotoGP livestream: Watch the 2024 Malaysia Grand Prix for free Best Spatial Audio Headphones deal: Save $180 on Beats Studio Pro Best early Black Friday deals: Save up to $1,900 at Samsung Best Amazon deals of the day: Google Pixel Buds Pro 2, Fitbit Versa 4, Sony WH NYT mini crossword answers for October 27 Which is Faster for Gaming, Windows 10 or Windows 11? Arkadium mini crossword answers for November 6 Roblox is adopting some new child safety features Webb telescope snaps spectacular view of distant cosmic scene
0.1502s , 10057.9140625 kb
Copyright © 2025 Powered by 【"musical eroticism in the pastoral world" and eubanks winkler】What Apple, Google, and Amazon’s websites looked like in 1999,Global Hot Topic Analysis
