Step into our time machine and travel back to September 4, 1998 when Google was founded. This is what their website looked like:
That’s Google in Beta test mode and trying out their new colorful logo. Let’s travel back a bit further, to July 5, 1994, when Amazon.com was founded. This what their website looked like:
Scads of sports stuff? A cornucopia of costume jewelry? We had a zealous copy writer on our hands in 1994! Let’s travel back even further to 1993 when mtv.com started their website, long before organizations like cnn.com, nytimes,com, and many other news outlets. Here’s a peek of their site:
The truth is exactly what you hear parents telling their #selfie sons and daughters: you truly can’t erase something once you put it online. But with tools like the Way Back Machine, it makes checking out what websites looked like in the past pretty fun. If you haven’t used Way Back Machine before, this is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, based in San Francisco, California. Try it yourself! Go to archive.org/web and type in your website. You’ll see how many packets of data, or snapshots, have been taken of that website. Then click on a year to navigate to, with the blue dot indicating a screen shot has been taken.
Click on a blue dot within a date to open the time capsule and view any website in the past. What did your website look like back in time?
