I don’t know why, but I enjoy old things. Perhaps looking into the past at the way things were and how things where done differently gives me a new perspective for the way things are now. One of my new favorite films is Cars which tells the story of a town on Route 66 that was forgotten when the interstate system’s Route 40 bypassed it. Someday, it’s my dream to drive the length of old Route 66 (which is now known by many different route numbers) from Chicago to Santa Monica, CA and visit some of these forgotten places.
It’s also a trip to look back at what websites looked like a few years ago. Using The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it’s possible to view web sites from almost the start of the web. For example, here is Messiah’s site as it was 8 years ago today:
http://web.archive.org/web/19990423093756/www.messiah.edu/index.htm.
(Give the page a chance to load; some images will be broken)
We’ve come a long way, baby.
April 23rd, 2007 at 9:32 am
Great post, Bob! It is fun to look back at the Messiah site in the wayback machine and see how the pages evolved over time. Definitely puts things in perspective. Another one I really like is Ghost Sites of the Web. Have you seen that one? It’s at http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/ and has screenshots of “dead” web sites. It’s funny to look through the “Museum of E-failure” (http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/mef.shtml) and reminisce about companies from the dot-com era. There are several in there that I worked with when I did project management consulting in the late 1990’s, like iCast (sort of an early version of mySpace for bands) and ExchangePath (an unsuccessful attempt to take on the big boys at PayPal). Those were the “good old days” when you’d come to work one morning and find out the company you just had a meeting with the day before had closed up shop overnight and were nowhere to be found.