Time Travel the Internet: View any website from (almost) any year
Most people don’t know that you can look up past “snapshots” of almost any website. Archive.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that was formed to build an expansive Internet library. Since 1996, the organization has been archiving digital content t
2Enter the website you’d like to view and click Browse History
I decided to check out Amazon’s humble roots since I’ve been reading the Jeff Bezos biography One Click.
3Select a year
The Archive.org meta crawler visits popular sites more often. Each blue circular bubble indicates that a snapshot exists. In my case I searched for Amazon, the 7th most popular site on the web; this explains the blue blur that you see below.
You might notice by the “annual” snapshot bar graphs that overall snapshots have increased over the years — this is due to hard drive space becoming less expensive, resulting in more crawls being possible. After all, each snapshot isn’t just a mere image — it’s an explorable version of the site.
From here, you can either select a blue bubble to view the relevant snapshot or choose a different year to view. Let’s go deeper. Select an older year.
Note:
Many of the older snapshots don’t have all page elements recorded; in other words, you might visit eBay’s 1997 site and find that most of the images are missing. This was largely due to storage space restrictions of the time.
4Select a snapshot
After you’ve selected the year, find the specific date you’d like to explore. Explorable dates are denoted by the blue bubble. A larger bubble means that multiple snapshots exist for that date. Click on a date bubble.
5Bask in the glory of old design
It’s interesting to see not only how web design has changed but also how far we’ve come in such a short period of time.
Amazon in 1996: See it in action
