Many beige towers dominated the landscape. Telephone modems rose in a chorus of horror before granting drip-feed access. Pages in those years had developed a perverse addiction to the "blink" element, and every visit became a kind of digital carnival. That was the Web in the 90s, and if you want to undertake an archaeological expedition, all you have to do is visit the portal called Oldweb.today.
Free services, applications of all kinds, games, collaborative tools, news platforms, social networks, instant messaging, file sharing... the Web has come a long way, but we have no doubt that the best is yet to come. We thought the same in the middle of the 90s, when Microsoft ruled the world and having an email address was so rare that someone made a movie based on that tool. The Web of the 90s was simpler and more innocent, but not necessarily less chaotic. We had to work in very limited time windows (in fact, I blew up the bills of a couple of phone lines), and we made impossible promises to dark gods hoping to get 500 extra bytes per second to make our downloads faster.
What is Oldweb.today?
Interested in knowing "that" Web? The portal called Oldweb.today has everything you need. In essence, the portal runs an old browser and takes a link stored in multiple Web archives, so it is possible to view the original design of many pages without performing strange maneuvers on our computer. The technical aspect is much more complex than it appears. Oldweb.today uses Docker containers to manage user sessions, a trio of emulators (Wine, Basilisk and Sheepshaver) runs the browsers, Python WayBack works as a proxy, noVNC adds VNC support in HTML through WebSockets, and two APIs (Memento Web and MemGator) maintain communication with web archives (more than a dozen, to be precise).
My attempt
Without a doubt we are facing very advanced software work, but there is a problem: I could not make it work. After three browsers and two different computers, I was forced to throw in the towel, imagining that perhaps there are too many requests waiting. Even so, I think you should try it. If you don't know exactly which page to visit, the "I'm feeling Random" button will present a suitable link for you to start your exploration. Compare what appears on your screen with the Web you can enjoy today: Some things could be much simpler, but there are others that under no circumstances should we return to (set fire to an America Online CD-ROM...)
