Gimme that old time home page...
December 19, 2010 8:13 AM   Subscribe

Where can I see examples of personal internet home pages made in the 1990s?

That is, "home pages" of individuals, not companies.
I'm talking gaudy floral borders, animated .gifs galore, unreadable italic script in yellow lettering on a lavender background...you all remember. The clunkier, the uglier, the home-madier, the better.

I Scroogled "internet home pages of the 1990s" but didn't find what I wanted.
posted by BostonTerrier to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
You can probably find endless examples by browsing the Wayback Machine's GeoCities archive.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://geocities.com


If you're not familiar with Geocities, it was one of if not the first build-and-host-your-own-webpage services.

Choose one of the Wayback Machine's archives (say, October 22, 1996), and then choose the Neighborhoods link on the archived page. The "neighborhoods" are all categories under which users created and filed exactly the sort of abominations you're describing.

Man, now *I* have to browse. Hello, nostalgia! I probably have a page in there somewhere...
posted by HenryGale at 8:39 AM on December 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


Well, Hello My Future Girlfriend was one that went a bit viral.
posted by starman at 8:42 AM on December 19, 2010


You're probably thinking of the personal web pages hosted by the likes of Geocities and Angelfire. While Geocities is no more, Angelfire is still around, so if you search for "angelfire home pages," you'll find some good examples. (Such as this one.)

Here's a home page that appears to be self-hosted, but clearly started life as a Geocities site.

The author Nassim N. Taleb rather inexplicably has a very old-school home page; no animated GIFs, though.

And this isn't an example per se, but this site allows you to render pages in the Geocities style.
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:44 AM on December 19, 2010


Believe it or not, Tripod still exists! This web search got pretty good results. The first link is a personal site by a professor and is all single centered column, image HRs, and so forth. I haven't dug too deeply into the results, but I think that might be a good avenue. For what it's worth, it looks like angelfire is still kicking too, astoundingly.
posted by codacorolla at 8:47 AM on December 19, 2010


There's also reocities, which is a select portion of archived Geocities content before they died. You can browse by neighborhoods: http://reocities.com/neighborhoods/
posted by codacorolla at 8:49 AM on December 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


Here's mine...
posted by Confess, Fletch at 8:58 AM on December 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: oh boy, my day is now a wasteland of nostalgia.
Thanks, everyone!
posted by BostonTerrier at 10:13 AM on December 19, 2010


There was a metafilter thread on this a while ago.
posted by lollusc at 3:24 PM on December 19, 2010


one, two, three

Some great search terms are "webring" (I'd entirely forgotten those!), "psp" (as in.. wait for it.. PaintShop Pro!), and "precious" (because I usually associate the era with vomit inducing "angel" graphics).
posted by anaelith at 3:38 PM on December 19, 2010


geociti.es
posted by Rhomboid at 5:23 AM on December 20, 2010


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