Cliff Stoll (kooky scientist, Cold War era hacker, klein bottles) published a 1995 essay and then a book claiming the web was overhyped and apparently it became known for being so wrong. But overall I think he really nailed it!!!!!

went to a public lecture on transatlantic submarine cables where the entire audience was men of retirement age and i got to hold a segment of the original!!!

"why use google?" webpage from 1999

i'm obsessed with taylor swift's 2007 myspace bio

it rocks that in every era of recorded history teenage boys have been creating public chaos as entertainment

just fell into a rabbit hole of linguistics research where they write quiz questions with african american grammar/syntax and it's kind of fun to see which ones stump "standard english" speakers

love the amazon reviews for this brand of potato chips that used to only be sold in prison

"openai.com" was once the personal homepage of a guy named glenn (2001), and "tiktok.com" was the quaint shared homepage of a couple as their relationship progressed from dating to married with a baby (2000). THREAD!!!

love these getty images pics of justin bieber and eric carle goofing around on top of the empire state building in 2009

i found this book on archive.org called "motto book" and it's so funny i can't believe it was published in 1909

obsessed with the quirky in-person events tech companies used to have (netscape navigator jazz festival, yahoo nationwide yodel challenge, etc)

i'm poking around the y2k era ebay website in the wayback machine and it rocks so much. i love the pre 9/11 plane ticket listings

official testimonial page on the hotmail website (1997)

just learned pertussis vaccine was invented in the 50s by female scientists in grand rapids michigan where I’m from and i got really into this historian’s articles about it! anyway for some reason I called the number on her academic page and to my surprise SHE PICKED UP FIRST RING AND CHATTED!

here's a very wholesome tamagotchi memorial site from 1997 (google translated from japanese)

look at this scarf my mom made me for my birthday!

not even a giant hot dog can escape the long arm of the law

need more articles like this so I can keep alternating between actual news stories and preposterous headlines of decades past!!! please help

finally some important news

this design goes so hard