9 websites that will bring you back to the old internet

If there’s anything our culture loves, it’s nostalgia.

Pretty much every movie and television show these days is just a reboot of some thing of another era. I mean, my goodness, they rebooted Suicide Squad like five years after the initial version of Suicide Squad.

The internet has been around for long enough — and shifted so drastically in that time — that it’s really easy to get nostalgic for past versions of online life. I mean, remember things like Xanga or the old-school AOL homepage? Those sites are pretty much gone — at least how you knew them. But there remain a few sports for old school online life.

That in mind, if you’re ever in the mood for some internet-based nostalgia, we’ve got you covered. We rounded up 9 websites that’ll bring you back to the old internet.

No, we’re not talking the LeBron James reboot version of the movie. The original site for the Michael Jordan-led picture still exists and it’s delightfully GeoCities-esque. For the time — 1996 — it was groundbreaking and a novelty of sorts. Nobody was making websites for a movie back then. Now, the Space Jam site, is just kind of neat and fun to poke around on. And its design is certainly a reminder of a time when the principle concern of many sites was to be fun.

Yes, MySpace still exists! Just perhaps not how you’re imagining it. If you go to the homepage, it looks vaguely like a mashup of the old AOL homepage and an amateurish music blog.

Like, what is going on here?

But! Did you know you can recover some semblance of your old MySpace page, providing you had one back in the day? I should know, I did it. I wrote all about recovering and parsing through your old Myspace — and the strange nostalgia you’ll likely feel doing it. Give it a whirl and see what your life was like back then.

You can waste hours upon hours on the Internet Archive. It is what it sounds like: It saves different versions of sites throughout the history of the internet.

For instance, here’s what Mashable looked like in April 2009.

So you can pull up any of your favorite old websites and see what they looked like back in the day. Pretty neat.

I mean, it is what you expect. It’s an entire website dedicated to the low-tech game of pong. You can do one player or two player and three different difficulty levels. Fun, simple, and old school.

OK, Ebay is still very much a thing these days. But it’s been around forever — well since 1995, which is forever in internet years — and there’s something comforting about the way its listing style hasn’t changed much.

This is pretty much the same idea as Ebay. Also founded in 1995, Craigslist was (and still kind of is) the internet’s wild, wild west. I mean look at this site.

Nobody in their right mind would design a site that looks like this today. It still has the peace sign as its logo. It’s just blue link after blue link. There’s no organization and it’s a real crapshoot to find anything useful. But you also might find an awesome deal randomly around the corner. It’s a very old internet site that somehow remains useful.

Remember the days of clicking through a frontier adventure in class? Well, there’s a site that’ll let you play the 1990 version of Oregon Trail, the video game we all begged our teachers to play.

It’ll look and feel exactly how you remember it.

Brave travelers, all.
Credit: screenshot: Archive.org

Yes, there are archived versions of the Clinton/Gore and Dole/Kemp websites. Yes, they look old as hell.

It wasn’t much of a victory marathon now, was it?
Credit: Screenshot: dolekemp96.org

FogCam is, apparently, the oldest continuously operating webcam in the world. Created in 1994 by students San Francisco State University, its charge is simple: show the campus in real time.

Look at the students go.
Credit: Screenshot: Fogcam

It’s kind of boring because it only updates every 20 seconds. But that must’ve been some feat in 1994. So fire it up and enjoy the low-tech simplicity.