Have you ever heard of the Way Back Machine?
With more than 85 billion web pages archived, the Way Back Machine strives to to prevent the Internet – a new medium with major historical significance – and other ‘born-digital’ materials from disappearing into the past. Essentially, they’re trying to preserve the internet at each step of its evolution so that future generations might understand where it began.
Today, I decided to look up the first website I ever created. I was 15 at the time, and a HUGE Motley Crue fan. As a 15-year-old high school student, I had no money… and so I chose GeoCities (later bought by Yahoo!) as my free web host.
Take a good look — and have a good laugh:
- Motley Mobacracy Homepage circa 1999
- List of all pages archived by the Way Back Machine
Some of the funnier things I noticed about 1999:
- It doesn’t load, but I had a MIDI file playing in the background. The background image also doesn’t load.
- Shoving as much crap as possible into a vertical column seemed like a really good idea at the time.
- Animated GIF images were all the rage.
- What ever happened to Web Rings?
- What ever happened to animated Java applets?
- The days of scrolling marquees and blinking text are long gone.
I’m proud of my first website. That being said, I’m much more proud of how web standards have grown over the past 10 years!
About Arthur Kay 
