ProtoBlog

A restoration of early MetaFilter featuring posts, comments, and user profiles, with a live front page that updates in real-time.

A promotional microsite for Weird Al’s 1999 music video “It’s All About the Pentiums”, featuring streaming video links, lyrics, downloads, and behind-the-scenes content.

Captain Underpants author Dav Pilkey’s official website from 2000 has been added to Protoweb!

A restoration of Zophar’s Domain as it appeared in 1999, preserving one of the internet’s most influential early emulation websites, featuring emulator downloads, utilities, and public domain ROMs for classic systems.

A full early-2000s restoration of GameFAQs featuring 10,000+ games, text guides, downloadable save files, and user reviews.

Time.gov has been restored and is now available for everyone to check out!

www.wvia.org has been added to Protoweb!

operasoftware.com has been added to Protoweb!

First of all, I am thrilled to be part of the Protoweb team and this is my first contribution to the project. When I became part of the team, I immediately started brainstorming what my first website restoration project would be and, well, this was the result. Enjoy stepping back into time with this 1997 […]

Are you excited for Santa to visit you this Christmas?  You should check out what’s happening at the North Pole then.  Everyone is very busy this time of the year.  Santa is doing final checks on his list.  The elves are finishing up on the toys.  The reindeer are taking it easy before the long […]

Protoweb started as a shared effort to preserve, explore, and learn from the early web and over time it’s grown into something more meaningful: a place where people bring real knowledge, curiosity, and care for the work and for each other. As more projects, conversations, and collaborators came together here, we recognized the need to […]

Do you still remember renting videos before the days of streaming?  Blockbuster was probably the most well known of the video rental stores around.  Founded in 1985, as a single store, it quickly evolved into a chain that spread all across the country.  However, it wasn’t until 1996 that they started their first website. The […]

The Nightmare on Elm Street film franchise started in 1984 by the legendary Wes Craven.  By 1999, 7 films in total were part of the franchise.  Within the early web, these films had a cult following.  This was one of the more well made fan sites was created in time for the VHS and DVD […]

Are you ready for the spookiest site in cyberspace?  Then you have come to the right place.  Today we have the Haunted Homepage from 1996.  The main attraction on this site is the haunted house interactive game.  Explore each room for chilling secrets while avoiding monsters, traps, and other spooky sights. Other areas of interest […]

Have you ever seen ghosts?  Is your house haunted?  If so, this site may be of interest to you. GhostStudy was created by Jim Eaton in 1999 to document pictures, stories, and EVP audio of ghosts.  The site features a large collection of pictures submitted by dedicated people along with their stories and analysis by […]

The Blair Witch Project was released to theaters on July 14, 1999.  At the time it was notable for combining the found footage filming style with the earlier release of the website.  It was one of the first to make use of the Internet for driving interest.  The creators documented events on the site as […]

Located in Fort Myers, Florida, PegaNet was the largest dialup ISP in the area.  It originally started out as Pegasus Software and Imaging in 1969, along with Pegasus Project BBS later on.  With the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, they began offering dialup service for $15 per month. The homepage has been […]

Kahn originally started out as Kahn97 in 1997 by Stargate Networks as an alternative to other similar services such as Kali.  Earlier versions of this software had licensed options, but the last version (v1.3) was completely free.  Originally designed to play Descent, it was expanded to other games later.  The following games were supported, but […]

The Videolan website from 2001. A huge archive of early VLC releases for multiple Linux distros, early PPC Mac OS X, and the first ever release of VLC for Windows. Soon to become one of the greatest pieces of free open-source software available on the internet.

Tingo was a service that provided ISPs with custom-branded internet software users could use on their desktops, such as web browsing, email, IM, bookmarks, etc. What made the service unique was the fact if generated revenue through service integration and reduced churn as opposed to the heavy advertisement and popup ads the early 2000s was plagued with. Tingo has been inactive since 2005.

The homepage of the BBC Networking Club, the original site of the BBC, first established on the internet in 1994. The website is one of the oldest on Protoweb and is the oldest website hosted on the wayback machine, dated to March 1995. The site remained short lived as the BBC soon moved to bbc.co.uk towards the end of 1995.

O2 is one of the UK’s leading mobile networks, and has been since its rebranding from BTCellnet in 2001. This site contains information about a lot of the services and mobile devices available at the time. O2 – “See what you can do”

The web search feature to find programs that can open unsupported file types on XP is back in its original 2001 design (dead since 2006), a huge amount of file types are recognised by the service and contain links to a number of software sites

Zelda.com (2001) returns with guides, walkthroughs, lore, and a unique mini map navigation. Requires Flash Player.

AddictingGames.com has been restored to its mid-2004 version, featuring classic browser games. Requires Flash, Shockwave, and Java plugins, available on Protoweb.

1for1.com – Your free link to etraffic promotion

“Do a Barrel Roll!”

  Nestled along California’s northern coast are two counties: Humboldt and Del Norte. Comprising a 5,282 sq. mi. (13,690km²) swathe of land, this region of the Golden State is an incredibly remote expanse that is taken up almost entirely by vast Redwood forests. Of the 164,206 individuals who live in these two counties, nearly half […]

  Leonardo DiCaprio is someone who I really only know through the movies he starred in later in his career, like Django Unchained and Shutter Island. I knew about Titanic and the fact that it made boatloads of money (haha get it), but it’s a movie that I’ve never seen nor care enough to watch. […]

WWWVOice is…well, it’s a lot of things.For starters, its domain is www.wwwvoice.com, not www.voice.com; this is something that has already tripped up multiple people in the testing phase. Deliberately confusing names aside, the best way that one can describe this labyrinth of a website is as a brief glimpse into a parodic universe’s version of […]

www.littledebbie.com (1996)

Animal lovers and furries rejoice: four new websites focusing on animals have been restored! These websites all come from archives taken from the K-CD series, a collection of magazine cover disks that were widely distributed in Scandinavia. www.wolfpark.orgWhile wolves historically lived throughout the Great Lakes region, by the early 20th century they had been all […]

The website of Basta Computing, a company that produced small shareware and freeware utilities for Windows, has been restored. They seem to have been quite well-known in their time, having won dozens of awards for their widespread software. Their most famous piece of software — if awards are a measurement of fame, that is — […]

The Diamond Lane was a smaller ISP based in Hayward, CA, a city located on the eastern side of the San Fransisco Bay Area. While it was far from the largest in the region — the Bay Area was a highly competitive market for ISPs, and I’ve managed to find at least twenty local ISPs […]

Be the man now dog!

  First, some context. One of the most fondly remembered aspects of the old Internet was the prevalence of personal homepages; filled with animated GIFs, gaudy backgrounds, and barebones HTML, these are considered a staple of the web’s first decade. When brought up, names such as Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod are typically the first to […]

RocketSnail.com has been added to Protoweb! This site features Experimental Penguins, a Flash web toy providing a live chat room. Site requires the Flash player plugin to browse.

  Jeffrey Zeldman is not a name that typically appears during discussions surrounding the web of old. While he was fairly well-known across the internet during the late nineties, it seems as though the passage of time has relegated him to obscurity. While understandable – he’s far from the only person who can fit into […]

  The Corporation was a comedy-focused website that was most active in 1996, centering around a fictional corporation named…well, The Corporation. While it does contain quite a bit of written content in the form of satirical articles, it was most well-known for its mock awards that it encouraged visitors to use in their homepages. While […]

The Internet homepage for telecommuncations cabling and IS company ExtraNet. (1999)

The official website of Beach Tech has been restored on Protoweb. Their internet survey software, EForm, became well-known for its usage with tourbus.com and went on to be used by many other high-profile websites. Big thanks to Nyyss0nen for testing this website as well as tourbus.com and netsquirrel.com! It wouldn’t have been possible without their […]

The Internet Tourbus, a newsletter run by Bob Rankin and Patrick Crispin dedicated to showing various places around the web, has been restored on Protoweb. Every edition up to February 4th, 1999 is available, as are both author’s homepages.

Barryboys – “This site is dedicated to all those Barry boys who think that superglue and some over-sized airfix kit turns an Escort 1.3 into a Performance Car. If you’re brave enough to put pictures of your car on the internet, then you’re brave enough to stand up here and be counted.“

BIC is a company which designs and manufactures instrumentation for particle characterisation. A heavily advanced scientific website, but still very interesting to take a look at. (1997)

The hub of all easy ventures as of 2002. Home to the likes of easyJet, easyCar and many others.

Ford’s UK website from 1998! This site travels back to the era of Escorts and Mk4 Fiestas. Site contains loads of information on not only consumer vehicles, but commercial vehicles as well such as the Transit. There is even a Ford Ka QuickTimeVR and screensaver available for download 😛

This website from 1996 has Greenland and related tourist information, as well as information about businesses, cities, transportation and even a free screensaver. Learn about Greenland at Greenland Guide!

The website for the Ikebana Centre in the Queensland city of Gold Coast has been restored on Protoweb.  A seemingly forgotten art school, the Ikebana Centre seems to have gone defunct in the early 2000s; it specialized in the Japanese art of flower arrangement, otherwise known as ikebana (hence the name). There’s little mention of […]

Backbeat media was one of the first major online advertising networks following its launch in 1997. Some of its most well known partners include the likes of LowEndMac, MacObserver and MacGamer along with many other sites. (2002)

Protoweb thanks everyone for an absolutely awesome 2024. This year we saw 15 new volunteers hop on the project, and a whopping 31 new sites launched! We’d like to especially recognize @Davathan for launching a mind numbing seven new websites. Up in the running we have @mariteaux who launched four new sites and @Stubbertville and […]

Australia’s National Multicultural Broadcaster Online. SBS serves as a touchstone for migrant communities separated from their culture, and perhaps their homes. Bringing communities together and fostering a sense of individual identity as not just a migrant, but wholly Australian.

MiniClip.com has been added to Protoweb! Featuring over 100 classic action, adventure, shooter, sports, puzzle games and more! This site requires flash, shockwave and java plugins.

Time to pick up your favorite chips for this one

The classic mIRC website has been finally completed and released on Protoweb. Probably the world’s best IRC client for Windows, this popular client is still being maintained to this day, and has a perfect balance of ease of use, but also great features for the more advanced users, such as scripting support and DCC file […]

Wikipedia.org has been added to Protoweb! Browse live articles and deep browse links across English Wikipedia. Content provided via MediaWiki API.

Wake up gamers! Gamefan.com is now online! Thanks to ArielChandia2 for the suggestion, and to www.macintoshrepository.org, without which there would basically be no images in the Mac demo section.  With it’s delicious Cybercore Metalheart-type aesthetic and treasure trove of gaming information including reviews, pictures, cheat codes and more, I couldn’t resist restoring this website. It […]

Archive of giantspace.net, a free internet hosting service

We are thrilled to share that www.isuzu.com is now a part of Protoweb!  This restored site travels web surfers back to Isuzu’s American market lineup of the year 1998 : The Trooper, a rugged SUV known for its off-road capabilities; the Rodeo, a mid-size SUV that balanced style and utility; the Amigo, a compact SUV […]

Macplay.com, the website for Interplay’s former Macintosh publishing division, as been added to ProtoWeb.

We are thrilled to announce the restoration of Be Inc’s original website, Be.com, to ProtoWeb! For those who may not remember, Be Inc was a pioneering technology company founded by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée. Be Inc was best known for its innovative operating system, BeOS, which was ahead of its time with features like […]

gamecraft.com has been added to Protoweb!

MarsAttacks.com has been added to Protoweb!

Krispy Kreme, circa 1998! Thanks to zachary_l_99 for suggesting it. This website was too cute not to restore, check out that landing page graphic! Most everything was still intact, all it took was a little hunting to get the broken images restored, as well as a conversion of some pages from CFML templates to HTML. […]

e-machines.net has been added to Protoweb!

Top Gear Homepage, from circa 1996.

bleem.com has been added to Protoweb!

imax.com has been added to Protoweb!

Blog entry for www.edmark.com

GTE (General Telephone) website from 1996. It provides information about the products and services GTE offered. The “Evolutions” section contains stories relating to Y2K.

www.radiocontact.ro, a radio-station website from Romania has been added to Protoweb. Also features a working ShoutCAST link thanks to the original site owner.

welcometogreedville.com, the site of Wario Land 4 on Game Boy Advance has been added to Protoweb. This site contains promo screenshots, downloads, mini-games and more!

Gotta catch ’em all, circa 1999.

Neopets.com has been added to Protoweb! Featuring Flash games, The Neopian Times newsletter and info about the Neopets world.

Bionicle.com has been restored by Protoweb. This version of the site from 2001 info on the various early Lego sets for Bionicle along with comics, screenshots, downloads and more. The site also features the full version of Mata Nui Online game, a point and click adventure Flash game. 

Jagex.com is now available to browse on Protoweb! This is the site of Jagex, the company known for Runescape. Several playable Java games are featured on this site from early in Jagex’s history. Enjoy playing!  

Becuase newer is not always better!

possibly the most advanced webpage of the 90s

I picked this site as my first to restore for a few personal reasons. Primarily because it represents one of the very few times that my dad had purchased something extravagant for the family. This was the only time I remember seeing him purchase something on the spot. This happened at a temporary PrimeStar vendor stand outside of a K-Mart in South Carolina.
Secondly, PrimeStar opened a new world to me that I wasn’t even aware of at the time. That was the world of documentary television.
When I was in high school I began to fall in love with history. What helped to propel this appreciation for history was the availability of The History Channel that was beamed into my home via PrimeStar. I didn’t really watch a whole lot of regular TV as a kid, but suddenly I found myself checking TV listings to learn about upcoming episodes that discussed some long lost civilization or peoples that I had yet to learn about. My favorite show at the time was the weekly series “In Search of History”.
Nowadays the History channel is a shadow of its former self, broadcasting mostly conspiracy-theory episodes and odd fringe television series. But I recall a time where I would look forward to that weekly episode of “In Search of History” and marvel at some historic topic.

This is the steam site from when valve first launched steam back in 2002! There is a revival of the steam client from then somewhere out in the infinite space we call the inwebs, but for those who cant find this is next best thing, right?

The 2003 version of valves classic Condition Zero game, check out screenshots and news about the latest version at the time!

The official website of half-life from 2002! This version of the site was made in preparation of Half-Life 2!

Classic FPS counter, now on protoweb for windows 95, me and xp!

WarpStream.org brings video streaming to retro hardware. Choose from Flash player, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player. Features classic videos and modern videos from partner content creators.

PSX Planet is a comprehensive repository of cheat codes and other helpful contents for more than 300 PlayStation games.

dts is a company that focuses on audio equipment for theaters and the home, this site has alot of info about them and hardware they created!

A design firm known for making the DTS site and The KIA site, It is a cool look into how much a professional site cost and how they were made!

The Audience is Listening…

A classic D.C. burger joint that’s now spread across the nation!

A Pretty small label especially in 1997, Home to a couple artists such as Hayden and Veruca Salt.

design productions is a Canadian based company as as far as I could find no longer exists so this is a neat little look at it.

Its a pretty small site, but is the home of some pretty big names! Powerman 5000, Chris Rock and a few more too! You can check out some demos from them and look at exclusive photos!

Home to bands such as pitchshifter, Nirvana,  sonic youth and much more! They later got bought out by MCA (now Universal).

Subway from 1997 was from well before they rebranded and simplified, having their old wallpaper as the background of the site, there’s some cool things on the site such as the menu of the time and an entertainment guide!

The website of the absolutely brilliant stop-motion studio and creators of one of the best mini series Wallace and gromit, this site is from 97 and is full of fun info and vr quicktime downloads!

Classic site for a classic snack!

Last of the big box giants

THEY KILLED KEN- errr…. whoops wrong site, This site is for a mall in Charlotte, NC and predates the titular show with the same name by 37 years, this archive is from 1997 and is a great little capture of how the mall was in the 90s!

www.omnitel.lt

Ubi Soft Entertaiment