Destinations

Places on the internet worth visiting. This is a list of my favorite websites.

The websites in this list are not necessarily compatible with old browsers.

Web 1.1

Current websites that work with OLD browsers such as Netscape, NCSA Mosaic, Internet Explorer and so on as well as services that make old applications usable again.

I was calling this "today's web 1.0" but that's honestly kinda confusing. I recently found this intersting forum posts Web 1.1 - Building The New Old Web via my Old'aVista referrers and I like the idea of calling this "Web 1.1". I just don't necessarily agree that we NEED to follow any design standards. If your current site works on legacy browsers, like this one, to me it's part of the Web 1.1.

Some websites here will repeated because they fit in multiple categories.

•  The Old Net - This is a project that aims to bring the internet of yesterday back. It uses the wayback machine apis to deliver the old websites while removing any code that would be incompatible with old browsers. With it you can browse the old internet on your retro computer. They also have a proxy server available that makes the experience way more immersive.

•  Old'aVista - Okay, I know this is a bit of self-promotion, but this is a great site, if I say so myself. I built Old'aVista to be a search engine where you can find old personal websites from services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL Hometown, Xoom and other services that are available in the Internet Archive.

• FrogFind! - Do you want to search the modern web and view its content on Vintage Computers? Well, you are in luck! The Youtuber Action Retro built this website that can be used to do just that!!

• 68k.news - Do you find yourself browsing websites like the bbc.co.uk via TheOldNet and thinking. Maaan… This is all old news, I wish I could see what's going on now on my very low memory Vintage Computer! Well, you are in luck again! Also built by Action Retro, 68k.news is a website that shows the Google News in basic HTML. Now you can get pissed off with the state of the world on your Vintate Computer as well!!

• This is a motherfucking website. - Basically the most effective guidelines and standards for a perfect website.

• Fan of the 90's - I discovered this website by Googling Old'aVista. And for some reason I fell in love with it, there's something about it's simple but very 90's design that is really appealing to me. It's really well done and it's supposed to work on old browsers.

Preservation

Places dedicated to keeping the internet of old alive. With these we can still access websites and software from the old internet today. You probably already know about these but they should be linked anyway.

• Internet Archive - From their website, the "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and more."

  It's incredible how much they have been able to archive over the years, my favorite part is definitely the Wayback Machine, in which you can visit old websites.

  

•  The Old Net - This is a project that aims to bring the internet of yesterday back. It uses the wayback machine apis to deliver the old websites while removing any code that would be incompatible with old browsers. With it you can browse the old internet on your retro computer. They also have a proxy server available that makes the experience way more immersive.

•  Old'aVista - Okay, I know this is a bit of self-promotion, but this is a great site, if I say so myself. I built Old'aVista to be a search engine where you can find old personal websites from services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL Hometown, Xoom and other services that are available in the Internet Archive.

• GifCities - This is not like Giphy, instead, this uses the internet archive to find Gifs from geocities websites, so these are proper gifs from 90's websites.

• Escargot - Do you miss MSN Messenger? I know I do and well… It's still alive and kicking through this service called Escargot. They managed to reverse engineer the MSN servers and you can use MSN Messenger just like you would in the early 2000's!!

• OoCities.org - In 2009, Yahoo decided to discontinue Geocities, and with it kill a HUGE part of internet history. Could they have kept it up? Yes! Would it have cost them a lot of money to do it? NO! But they did it anyway. Luckily people managed to scrape and save a lot of the contents from Geocities and that content was made available in a few websites, one of them being OoCities. You can actually download the whole archive via torrent, it's about 600gb (which is nothing for Yahoo…)

• MUZEUM INTERNETU.cz - This website is a gem I found recently, it has a lot of cool stuff related to internet history, but for me the best part is the videos section. Apparently the author used to record videos browsing the internet for computer classes they used to teach in the 90's and they made those videos available on the site. There are some areas of some sites you can't access via the Internet Archive that can be seen in their videos. The website is in Czech though, so you might need to use Google Translate to browse through it, which is not a problem at all in my opinion.

Still alive

Websites from yesterday that are still online! Some of them may have not been updated in thousands of years, but they can still be useful.

• Calmira.de - Calmira is a replacement shell for Windows 3.x that makes it look and act like Windows 95. This website is also featured in the Windows 3.x resource page links, I'm putting it here because it's been around forever and it's still up.

• Gaby's Homepage for CP/M and Computer History - This is a website that I used to go to all the time in the early 2000's with a lot of cool computing resources.

• win31.de - This website was also made by Gaby Chaundry, the author of the website above and it's all about Windows 3.1x. Of the two websites this is the one I visited the most.

• Nathan's Toasty Tech - A classic website that has been around since the 90's and is still alive.

• ACME Laboratories - A lot of computing resources. Apparently this site has been around since the early 90's and the last update was in 2020!!

• Toad Hall - Another website that has been around since the 90's about computing and still is pretty much the same.

• Dole/Kemp 96 - I avoid politics on this website like hell as this is a place for fun. But this Dole/Kemp campaign website from 1996 is still up! I don't care what they stand for in terms of politics (and I don't know what they stand for), this website is too cool not to share.

• O.J. Simpson Trial Website - Again, I don't want to talk about depressing stuff on this site, we already deal with a lot of it in the real world. But this CNN O.J. Simpson Trial website has also been around since the 90's and it's still up. So I thought it would be cool to list it here.

• 1996 Space Jam website - Until very recently, the original Space Jam website from 1996 was still available in the www.spacejam.com domain. But they decided to do an overhaul of the website for the second movie. The cool thing is that they decided to keep the old site up in a subpath and you can still access it today! The only bummer is that it now requires https, so you'll need a proxy to use it in your retro computer.

Web 1.9?!?

Imagine how much crazier websites would be if we could use modern technologies in the 90's?

Well you don't have to because the following websites are built with the Web 1.0 spirit, but using modern technologies to take them to a whole new level.

Some of them are current personal websites, and some of them are just paying an homage to the internet of the past.

I decided to call these the Web 1.9. It's the Web 2.0 without the BS.

• Make Frontend Shit again - In the spirit of bringing personality back to the internet, Make frontend shit again!

• Cameron's World - I found this website in the old net webring, if you want to have an overdose of gifs and 90's design language, this website is for you. It's insane but I find it extremely nostalgic at the same time.

• flower.codes - A simple website by a guy called Zach, it has some interesting reading but most of all it shows one side of the web 1.0 spirit that can be a bit forgotten. Sites that just go straight to the point. No flashy animations and images, just plain text and content. Sometimes that's all you need.

• - The 90's spirit with a beautiful web design heavily inspired by 80's synthwave aesthetics. This is a very cool looking website with some interesting content.

• - Another site like the example above, but a bit simpler. Also with a really nice design and some really interesting content.

• SADGRL.ONLINE - The author of this website, Sadness, seems like a huge advocate for the spirit of the Web 1.0 today. They really have put a lot of work to give a lot of interesting resources to people who want to build a cool website.

• The Yesterweb - Created by the same author of sadgrl.online, Sadness, this website is dedicated to the broader movement around making the internet a fun and personal place again.

• Wiby - A search engine for user submitted websites. You know? The good old personal Websites.

• - This is what GeoCities was supposed to be if it was still alive today. Neocities allows you to host your own personal website very easily so you don't have to deal with BS from the major hosting websites. (I got the 88x31 from the TurtleWhich website.)

• 88x31 Button Maker - This is a simple 88x31 button maker. This is a huge part of the Web 1.0 and you can create your own with it if you don't want to use a more complex image editing software.

• Cheapskate's Guide - A simple blog with a LOT of interesting articles.

• Vistaserv.net - They describe themselves as "a grass-roots web hosting initiative hailing from Thornbury, Australia. Inspired by the quirky web of the 90s, we allow users to create home pages, your own little sandbox on the World Wide Web, as it were". It's another cool hosting website for personal pages.

• 3GI Industries - I don't know what this is, but I like it.

• The Top Notch List of Top Shelf Links - Created by Richard Bettridge, the creator of The Old Net. This is basically a list of links built with such style that will defintelly bring your cpu its knees.

• Richard Bettridge - The personal website of Richard Bettridge, the creator of The Old Net, with all of the projects he's worked on.

• SpaceHey - An early 2000's MySpace replica. It's pretty cool!

Computing Resources

• Winworld - This is a website that has been around since 2002 or 2003. This is THE website to find old versions of software in general, especially Microsoft operating sytems. It kinda sucks that they updated the website to use bootstrap or whatever, the old design used to be great.

• OLDVERSION.com - Did you know that Winamp is realeasing the classic Winamp skin as an NFT? Now why would you buy that when you can go to the oldversion.com website and download Winamp 2.x and many other old versions of softwares? With Winamp 2.x, you not only get the classic skin but you also get a great MP3 player that works great on old computers and that cool "Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass" when you start it up.

• Calmira.de - Calmira is a replacement shell for Windows 3.x that makes it look and act like Windows 95. This website is also featured in the Windows 3.x resource page links, I'm putting it here because it's been around forever and it's still up.

• Gaby's Homepage for CP/M and Computer History - This is a website that I used to go to all the time in the early 2000's with a lot of cool computing resources.

• win31.de - This website was also made by Gaby Chaundry, the author of the website above and it's all about Windows 3.1x. Of the two websites this is the one I visited the most.

• VOGONS - This needs no introduction, it's the biggest forum about retro computing on the internet.

• GUIdebook - Graphic User Inteface Gallery - Wanna see what the UI of GS/OS or NeXTSTEP looked like. Well, this is the place to do that. This website hasn't been updated in a long time, but it's still an interesting place to visit.

• VETUSWARE - This is probably one of the biggest abandonware download collections in the world. It's a bit of a mess, but you can find basically anything you want there.

Retro-Gaming

• DCEvolution - A lot of cool pieces of software for the Sega Dreamcast.

• Psilocybin Dreams - A page dedicated to the Sega Dreamcast, home of the XDP Browser, a homebrew browser for the Dreamcast, but it also has other resources.

• Blue Swirl - Another page dedicated to the Sega Dreamcast with tools and other things for download.

• Sonic the Hedgehog Info Page - More resources about Sonic and the Sega Dreamcast, this website is very delightfully Web 1.0. I think it might work on the Dreamcast browsers.

• DreamPipe - A Sega Dreamcast portal built with the Sega Dreamcast browsers in mind with resources and . It's built with the design of the SegaNet website containing Leaderboards, VMU content and so on.

• The Dreamcast Junkyard - One of the biggest websites dedicated to the Sega Dreamcast.

Random Stuff

• The Useless Web - If you want to spend hours on websites that serve no purpose whatsoever, this is the place for you. I like this website because it links to websites that are not trying to be anything, it has the spirit of the old internet where people would create a website because they could, not becuase they should. I don't know, it's hard to explain this one.

• LINGsCARS - This is a car rental company from the UK… The website is crazy, in an awesome way. I guess you can use it to rent a car if you go to the UK as well.

Linkback

If you want to add a link to my website on your website, you can use this awesome 88x31 button that Cadence from https://cadence.moe made:

Just copy the snippet below: