Retro
Retro Web
Simulated TV channels by decade, old operating systems and the specific texture of an interface designed for a CRT.
18 sites
A community of personal website makers with tutorials, events and a directory of members' handmade sites to wander between.
Windows 98 rebuilt in JavaScript, right down to the window chrome and the sound the error dialogs make.
A collage assembled entirely from GeoCities pages — every GIF, marquee and tiled background salvaged and put back to work.
A search engine that strips every result down to plain HTML so it can be read on a genuinely ancient computer. Also very fast.
A search engine for animated GIFs recovered from GeoCities. Type any word and receive several spinning versions of it.
The wiki of a movement for owning your own website: guides, tools and real examples of people publishing on their own domains.
A hand-built indie web hub with a forum, a club of personal sites and guides to making your own homepage the old-fashioned way.
Noughties television as it actually was, which is more unsettling than the eighties version because you remember most of it.
A simulated television set showing nothing but 1980s programming and adverts, complete with channel dial and static between stations.
The same idea moved a decade forward. Flip channels through the nineties and land somewhere between a cartoon and a cereal advert.
A free host for handmade personal sites in the Neocities spirit, with a browse page full of members' pages to click through.
A free host built as a deliberate successor to GeoCities, full of hand-written personal pages by people who wanted to make one.
News for nerds since 1997, with tech headlines and threaded comments kept in order by a reader moderation system older than most social networks.
A proxy that serves archived pages as period browsers expected them, so a 1998 machine can still get online and see 1998.
A shared Unix server where members publish plain HTML pages under their usernames. Started as an experiment in 2014 and still going.
Screenshots of thousands of websites from 1991 onward, arranged so you can watch entire interface conventions appear and die.
A parody desktop that gets progressively stranger the more of its programs you open. Start with the solitaire and keep going.
An operating system that never existed, built in a browser, with its own applications and a genuine sense of its own history.
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.
Retro Web: questions
How many sites are in Retro Web?
18 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?
18 of the 18 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
7 of 18 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 18 are safe for work and 15 work with the sound off.