📼 Nostalgic

Sweet wrappers collected and annotated for decades, arranged by how well the graphic design has survived contact with the present.

A scholarly reference to the whole genre, free to read, covering authors nobody else ever bothered to write up.

The original page describing the World Wide Web project, restored by CERN at its first address. Plain text and a few links.

Complete texts, timelines and scholarship for a writer whose entire output is public domain, on a site that has barely changed since 1994.

One of the first things the internet ever collectively lost its mind over, and it is still rows of dancing rodents and one loop.

Aggregates everything the music blogs posted today into one stream, which is how people found new records before playlists took over.

Every interactive fiction file anyone thought worth keeping since 1992, in a directory listing that has never once been redesigned.

Coin-operated arcade cabinets from the seventies onward, emulated in a tab, attract mode and all.

A student sold a million pixels of advertising at a dollar each in 2005. The mosaic is still up, and most of the links now go nowhere.

The listing that has catalogued live text MUDs since 1994, and still tells you which of them have people logged in tonight.

A proxy that serves archived pages as period browsers expected them, so a 1998 machine can still get online and see 1998.

A hand-maintained index of free books online, run out of Penn since before search engines were any good.

Millions of uploaded Minecraft skins plus an editor, which is the closest thing that game has ever had to a fashion scene.

Ripped sprite sheets from thousands of games, sorted by console — half reference library, half nostalgia trap.

Cecil Adams' archive of exhaustively answered daft questions, invented decades before you could just ask the internet.

Nearly a trillion saved web pages. Paste any address, pick a year, and see what was there — the single most important archive online.

A shared Unix server where members publish plain HTML pages under their usernames. Started as an experiment in 2014 and still going.

A photograph from the last century that you place on both a map and a timeline, which is much harder than either alone.

Scanned cereal boxes going back decades, with full career histories for the mascots, maintained purely for its own sake.

The browser strategy game half your school was awake at 3am for, still running, still fundamentally about raiding villages.

Medieval village building and tribe politics from 2003, where the real game is coordinating twenty players inside a spreadsheet.

Australia's national archive of newspapers, websites and photographs, digitised back to 1803 and open without an account.

The British Library's record of the UK web, collected under legal deposit — including sites their owners deleted years ago.

Boots Linux, Windows 98 and other complete operating systems in a tab, via an x86 emulator written in JavaScript.

Home-taped VHS uploaded wholesale to the Internet Archive, adverts, tracking lines and accidental recordings included.

Well over a hundred thousand scanned advertisements sorted by decade and subject. A very direct record of what people were told to want.

Forecasts built on a network of tens of thousands of amateur weather stations, so the reading is often from somebody on your actual street.

Screenshots of thousands of websites from 1991 onward, arranged so you can watch entire interface conventions appear and die.

Billions of generated puzzles in a layout untouched since 2005, which is precisely why it still loads before you finish blinking.

Winamp itself, reimplemented faithfully enough that the equaliser works. It really whips the llama's behind, in a browser tab.

Live webcams sorted by country and theme, from Alpine passes to Caribbean beach bars, with a great many pointed at completely empty roads.

Eighty live webcam effects, most of them terrible, all of them fun for exactly the ninety seconds required.

Search engine for hand-made pages in the spirit of the early web, with a surprise-me button that behaves exactly like 1998.

Roughly a hundred thousand Winamp skins, all loadable in the browser. An enormous accidental record of amateur graphic design.

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.

A working Windows XP desktop in a tab, with Minesweeper, Paint and the startup sound, for pure muscle memory.

Victorian engravings cut apart and given modern dialogue, producing jokes no other format could quite deliver.

Over a hundred solitaire variants with proper undo, statistics and card backs from 2007. Still the most complete one going.

Modern MUD platform with a proper browser client: play the hosted worlds, or build one yourself without touching a server.

Two decades of first-person hauntings submitted by the public, filed by country and picked apart politely in the comments.