The old internet

The default chess address for most of the planet, with a bot for every skill level and puzzles that will quietly humble you.

Nearly a million recorded games from four centuries of chess, replayable move by move, with the real arguments in the comments.

Scanned American newspapers from 1770 to 1963, full-text searchable, which is a dangerous thing to discover on a weeknight.

Decades of adverts preserved exactly as broadcast, including the jingles you will regret having remembered.

A global membership devoted to looking up, with a cloud of the day and a manifesto against blue-sky thinking.

Petabytes of crawled web pages released free for anyone to analyse. Most of the language models you have used started here.

Risk on hundreds of user-drawn maps, played slowly against a community that has been arguing about dice odds since 2006.

Home of Conway's Game of Life — pattern archive, wiki and a board for setting your own cells running.

Recipes laid out as a table of operations instead of prose, so you can see at a glance what combines with what and when.

The site every school network forgot to block, still hosting Run 3, Fireboy and Watergirl and almost no actual mathematics.

Nest and feeder cams run by the Cornell Lab, with ornithologists in the chat explaining what the bird is doing and why it matters.

One button that adds unicorns and rainbows to any web page, solving a problem that has never once been reported.

The EFF's test showing how uniquely identifiable your browser is from fonts, plugins and screen size alone. Most people are one in millions.

Blind items published daily since 2006, unverifiable by design, and treated as scripture by a very large comment section.

The tidied-up archive of internet horror folklore, from Slender Man to the stories a school friend swore blind were true.

Crude four-panel strips with a mean streak, running since 2005 and still finding fresh ways to end badly.

Long, carefully researched articles on forgotten disasters, obsessives and near misses from history.

Space MMO from 2006 still full of people mining, shooting and complaining about the economy, all inside one browser tab.

The charting tool most newsrooms quietly rely on, free at the sizes any one person will ever need.

Over a hundred thousand high-resolution scanned maps, georeferenced and free to zoom into more or less indefinitely.

Several hundred cipher, code and puzzle solvers in one place, from Caesar shifts to crossword pattern matching.

Field reports and photographs of American shopping centres in decline, written by people who cared about this long before it was an aesthetic.

German satirical news delivered with a completely straight face, plus a weekly video bulletin, running since 2008.

The 2007 original that turned maze building into a genre, played across a desktop with the icons still sitting on it.

A graphing calculator good enough that people make art with it — type a function and drag its parameters about.

Alarming research site about a chemical found in tumours, acid rain and every reservoir on earth. The chemical is water.

The original single-player dice conquest game: no accounts, no sound, no explanation, and still a perfect twenty minutes.

The same six panels of clip-art dinosaurs every day since 2003, with entirely different words in them each time.

The catalogue of every physical release ever pressed, down to matrix numbers and pressing variants, plus what your copy is worth.

A 1996 US presidential campaign website, still up, still exactly as it was. An accidental museum of early political web design.

Hundreds of dress-up games covering mythology, history and fandoms, drawn by actual artists rather than an asset pipeline.

An interface that forbids clicking entirely and makes you navigate by hovering, which is far stranger than it sounds.

Telephone played with drawings: describe a picture, draw a description, and watch the chain derail over twelve steps.

A directory that has been curating this genre since 2004, including a great many games nobody else bothered to archive.

Search without the profile building, plus bang shortcuts that fire your query straight at another site. Type an exclamation and w for Wikipedia.

Gamified courses in dozens of languages, plus the guilt engine keeping most people's streaks technically alive.

Thousands of public webcams pointed at squares, harbours, volcanoes and building sites, some with archives stretching back decades.

The 2001 humour portal that somehow still updates, with the same mix of clips, pictures and questionable taste.

The professional encyclopedia, still going, and a useful second opinion whenever Wikipedia gets contested.

Twenty-five years of accidentally poetic English on packaging and signage, photographed across East Asia.

Fifty million digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives, behind one search box.

Thousands of strangers claim to have dreamt the same face. Read the whole thing: the explanation is better than the hoax.

Writing community from 1999 where each subject gets personal essays instead of an encyclopaedia entry, and the tone never settles.

The largest collection of live nature cams anywhere: bear falls, puppy rooms, osprey nests and coral reefs, all free and always running.

NASA's real-time 3D model of every mission in flight, letting you ride along with a probe on its actual trajectory.

Home of the GROW games, where you choose an order for a handful of objects and then watch a tiny world assemble or fail.

London has been dragged underground by bats, and the writing is far better than that sentence suggests. Free, endless, faintly sinister.

Three infinite layers of colour falling forever over a low drone, from the net artist behind half the web's cult toys.