The old internet

Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.

Tens of thousands of fan-run wikis, each documenting one fictional universe in wholly unreasonable depth.

Build a machine from wheels and rods to push a ball into a zone, and accept that it will topple over the first nine times.

US government training films liberated from federal vaults. Sincere, badly acted, and occasionally about surviving a nuclear attack.

Flight tracking with the operational detail attached: delays, diversions, taxi times and the filed route rather than a tidy curve.

Every aircraft in the sky right now on one map. Click any of them for the route, the aircraft type and how far it still has to go.

The two-person studio behind the entire Papa's restaurant series, with the back catalogue and the odd non-cooking game too.

Nathan Yau's long-running blog on charts done well and badly, plus his own studies of how a day gets spent.

City building from the Stone Age to the near future, with a tactical battle grid and guilds fighting over a shared continent.

Street-level archaeology of the city — old lamp posts, painted signs and vanished railways, walked and documented since 1999.

Native speakers pronouncing individual words in hundreds of languages, for when a phonetic spelling is not enough.

Properly licensed free downloads curated by radio stations, which is how you stop losing your videos to copyright claims.

Answer vocabulary questions and the ad revenue goes to the UN World Food Programme. Running since 2007 and still counting grains.

A grid of small games and nothing else — no descriptions, no ratings, no explanation, exactly as it was in 2010.

Opens as a dismal educational maths game about a frog eating flies, and then keeps going somewhere else entirely. Say nothing more.

A million questions written and edited by volunteers since 1999, filed under categories nobody would ever think to commission.

A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.

The French national library's digital collection — manuscripts, maps, newspapers and photographs, millions of items deep.

Part indie games host, part social network, where horror fan games and unfinished experiments live cheerfully side by side.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

An interactive world atlas you can scrub year by year from 3000 BC, watching every border redraw itself.

Geometry, algebra and calculus tools in one place, plus a huge shared library of constructions others have built.

The same cruelty as QWOP, applied to climbing: every handhold is a different letter key and you have to hold several at once.

Name three bands you like, then answer yes or no to its guesses until it works out what you are actually in the mood for.

Red-carpet criticism written with real fashion knowledge and jokes aimed at the outfit rather than the person in it.

Positive news published daily since 1997, back when the idea sounded like a joke rather than a business model.

Castle building and siege warfare with the exact aesthetics of an advert you have definitely been served, and better strategy underneath.

Gigapixel scans from two thousand museums, plus the experiments that let you find your own face in a painting.

Plots how often a phrase appears across books printed since 1500. Watch a word arrive, peak, and quietly fall out of use.

Choose ten items in the right order and the cube blossoms into something absurd; choose the wrong order and it sulks at you.

The official register of the longest, fastest and most improbable things people have done entirely on purpose.

A boarding-school story with robots, forest gods and a plot that has been quietly paying things off since 2005.

Daily coverage of hardware projects that had no commercial reason to exist. Reliably the most inventive corner of the web.

Grey text on beige, no images, and the best comment threads anywhere about how technical things actually work. Search covers twenty years.

Mash any keys and perfectly formatted code appears character by character, exactly as in every hacking scene ever filmed.

Ragdoll obstacle courses in which the dad on the bicycle loses limbs to almost anything he touches, across millions of user levels.

Mr Doob's sketching toy, where strokes web themselves together with connecting threads and turn scribbles into shading.

One word of reassurance about the Large Hadron Collider, maintained since 2008 and still, reassuringly, saying no.

Seventeen million scanned volumes from research libraries, with full-text search running across the entire lot.

Football management one week at a time since 1997, with a transfer market and an economy run entirely by other managers.

The cult's own website, left exactly as it was in 1997 and still quietly maintained. A sobering artefact rather than a joke.

Tells you exactly when the space station will pass over your garden, and which direction to look.

Old photographs pinned to the exact street corner where they were taken, fading into the modern view behind.

Reaction time, sequence memory, the chimp test and verbal memory, each scored against millions of other people's attempts.

Allie Brosh's illustrated essays, including the two on depression that remain the best thing written about it.

The lolcat archive that taught the internet its first grammar, still posting captioned animals two decades later.

Overlays one country on another to scale, then works out how your life expectancy, income and odds of various things would change there.

Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.