Retro
Old Net Art
Personal pages, hand-written HTML, Winamp skins and net art from an era when nobody had decided what a website was supposed to look like.
12 sites
Eight hours on the networks that existed before the internet reached homes, released free by the person who made it.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
A 1996 US presidential campaign website, still up, still exactly as it was. An accidental museum of early political web design.
- 2 min
A browsable restoration of the GeoCities neighbourhoods, so you can wander into Area51 or SunsetStrip the way people once did.
- 1 hr+
An exhaustive archive of worlds built in a 1991 ASCII game creator, catalogued with more care than most national collections.
- 1 hr+
Rhizome's restored survey of a hundred works of net art, each with the context needed to understand why it mattered.
- 1 hr+
Screenshots of archived GeoCities pages posted automatically, one after another, as a rolling portrait of the amateur web.
- 10 min
The original film's promotional site, left online untouched for nearly thirty years and preserved when the sequel arrived.
- <1 min
Everything people typed at each other on bulletin board systems before the web existed, preserved as plain text and left open.
- 1 hr+
The original page describing the World Wide Web project, restored by CERN at its first address. Plain text and a few links.
- <1 min
One of the first things the internet ever collectively lost its mind over, and it is still rows of dancing rodents and one loop.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Winamp itself, reimplemented faithfully enough that the equaliser works. It really whips the llama's behind, in a browser tab.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Roughly a hundred thousand Winamp skins, all loadable in the browser. An enormous accidental record of amateur graphic design.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Old Net Art: questions
How many sites are in Old Net Art?
12 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
12 of the 12 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
10 of 12 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 12 are safe for work and 9 work with the sound off.