NetControl, some sort of old Greek magazine, cached thousands of random homepages between 1994 and 1997 and never took them offline. The result is a strange surfing experience, like randomly browsing the Wayback Archive for homepages.
If you like, you can skip their obfuscated navigation entirely and go straight to lists of the cached homepages (1, 2, 3, 4).
Like the Wayback Archive, it’s a great way to see old and ugly versions of popular sites. It’s also a great reminder of dead design trends, like “adjust your browser” notices, full-color backgrounds, rendered animations, giant imagemaps and splash screens, pages enhanced for Netscape Navigator 2.0 or optimized for 640×480.
Also, a CNNfn capture from July 1996, with the Dow up and Nasdaq at just over 1000. And graduate student Philip Greenspun and First Lady Hillary Clinton.
I went through and pulled out some of the best, so you won’t have to.
Dead (Or Mostly Dead) Dot-Coms
Urban Desires, Blender, Spiv, Rocktropolis, Ultimate Band List, IUMA, The Blue Dot, The Spot, ParentSoup, George Magazine, Film.com, Spanq, Voyager Multimedia, MMWire, .NET, Addicted to Noise, gURL, Women’s Wire, Stale (Slate parody)
News
Salon, Wall Street Journal, CNN, NYTimes, Gamespot
Tech
Netscape, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett-Packard, Macromedia, Apple, 3Com, Byte, Sony, PC World, PC Magazine
Offline Media
Wired, MTV, ESPN, NBC, CBS, Warner Brothers, Fox, New Line Cinema, MGM, Subpop Records, People, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, Playboy, Penthouse
Miscellaneous
If you’re wondering, I stumbled across it while searching for information about RTMark’s Simcopter gay easter egg prank. I found this cache of Gamecenter.com (only one month after their launch).
This was a great tour. thanks for all the memories, and for making me feel *a lot* better about the antic attic and nsw. ah, to be young again.
This was such a good find. Thanks.
I had completely forgotten about the “adjust your browser” recommendations.
great find Andy
Wow, RollingStone’s page looked a lot better back then 🙂
Crap, it looks like they removed all their old files. Sad, sad, sad.