The year was 1997. Apple was a struggling
computer company, AOL was a booming Internet service provider,
Microsoft was on the verge of releasing Windows 98, and the Web was a
very different place. Through the magic of the Wayback Machine, we can
travel back in time and revisit the past.
Apple, now the most valuable company in
the world, was a struggling computer company back in the ‘90s. Apple’s
website from 1997 seems like it’s about a completely different company
from the Apple we know today. But even back then, Apple was pushing
mobile devices – the eMate 300 in this case, which used Apple’s Newton
platform. (It was a flop.)
Google didn’t even have a website in
1997, so I’m cheating a bit here by showing you the page from 1998. The
iconic, minimalistic design is present here. Here’s a little-known fact:
the only reason Google started with such a simple design is because
they didn’t have a webmaster or anyone that knew HTML.
1997 was the pre-Google era, so people
used other search engines – like Yahoo. Yahoo was a pretty basic search
engine and directory back then, nothing like the jam-packed front page
it would become. But then, Yahoo just couldn’t be cluttered back then.
It would have taken too long to download over those old dial-up modems.
Microsoft was working on Windows 98 at
the time, and their “Where do you want to go today?” slogan featured
prominently on their website. The top headline – “Internet Explorer 4.0
Debuts to Critics’ Applause” – seems hilarious in retrospect, with
Internet Explorer ultimately becoming a drag on the Internet. At the
time, Microsoft was actually trying – and they would keep developing IE
until they released version 6, after which they stopped development,
leaving the Web to stagnate.
I’m going to cheat again because the
Wayback Machine doesn’t have any snapshots of Amazon.com from 1997, so
here’s a screenshot from 1999. The old Amazon actually looks
surprisingly modern. Of course, a big part of this is because Amazon’s
website had changed so little until the recent redesign.
AOL’s website really is a blast from the
past. The front page advertises the beta release ofAOL Instant
Messenger, which ultimately became very popular. It even offers a free
AOL trial, which brought many people online for the first time.
If you were around in the ‘90s, I’m sure
you remember GeoCities. Instead of creating blogs, people created their
own personal websites – and they usually looked horrible. GeoCities was
shut down in 2009, but it faded away and died many years before.
The New York Times shows us what a
newspaper website used to be like. The website attempts to bring the
familiar newspaper-style layout to a browser – luckily, newspaper
websites have advanced since then. It’s also amusing to see that the
early versions of Internet Explorer were considered “complex” in their
time.
If you weren’t using Yahoo, there’s a
good chance you were using AltaVista. AltaVista now just redirects to
Yahoo’s search results, and Yahoo is just a frontend to Microsoft’s
Bing.
The White House didn’t have a shiny
website back then – the website’s front page was the “White House
Virtual Library.” It offered the ability to browse and search a variety
of documents. No splashy front page with the latest news and
high-resolution images of the president here, just a glorified search
engine with a background that made the content harder to read.
One day, someone will write about how ancient the Web looked back in 2012 and marvel at how backwards we were.
Were you online in 1997? Do you have any other interesting old websites to share? Leave a comment and let us know.thecomputerhouse.blogspot.com
