Every homepage of that era ended in a links page — the door to the rest
of the web, back when the web felt small enough to recommend. This one is
the museum's only room whose doors all open outward: most lead to the
Wayback Machine's capture of a site as it looked then, and a few — marked
STILL LIVE — lead to pages that are,
astonishingly, still standing today.
The museum hosts none of these; it only points. Side
effects of time travel are the visitor's own responsibility.
The web as I saw it · Warwick, Ankara & Berlin, 1998 – 2007
The sites I actually remember dialing into. Memories drafted
by the curator's assistant; corrections by the curator himself.
1998University of Warwick— where the adventures abroad began, end of 1998. Its servers kept no trace of me.
1999AltaVista— where you searched before you googled.
1999Google— the clean white page that quietly ended the portal era. We didn't know yet.
1999Hotmail— your first email address that didn't belong to your ISP.
1999ICQ— uh-oh! The sound of the late nineties. My number — 10095455 — turns out to be sitting on my 1999 homepage's front page, one exhibit over.
1999Ekşi Sözlük— born the same year as my homepage; the Turkish web's collaborative dictionary of everything, still running.
2000Mynet— the Turkish portal: news, chat, email and everything else on one page.
2000Superonline— the ISP at the other end of the 56k handshake.
2000Milliyet— the morning paper, suddenly refreshing at lunchtime too.
2000ntvmsnbc— breaking news in Turkish, under the strangest joint-venture name of the era.
2000web.de— Germany's portal-and-email combo; every second German address ended in it.
2006Freie Universität Berlin— my university's homepage as the Berlin adventure began, end of 2006. The museum's hunt through its old servers for my own pages found nothing either.
2007Spiegel Online— the morning read of the Berlin years.
Famous neighbors · the sites every history mentions
1991The first websiteSTILL LIVE— the first page of the World Wide Web, restored by CERN at its original address.
1995Amazon— “Earth's biggest bookstore,” selling only books, captured as close to the beginning as the archive gets.
1996Yahoo!— the web as a directory: a hand-sorted catalog of everything, with an exclamation mark.
1997eBay— fresh out of its AuctionWeb years, still trading Beanie Babies and Pez dispensers.
1998Google, in beta— a Stanford research project with an “I'm feeling lucky” button.
1996Space JamSTILL LIVE— the most famous surviving 1996 website; Warner Bros never took it down.
1996Dole/Kemp '96STILL LIVE— a US presidential campaign, frozen mid-election for thirty years.
1999Hampster Dance— four rodent GIFs and a nine-second loop: one of the first memes to escape the web.
1999Zombo.comSTILL LIVE— “You can do anything at Zombo com. The only limit is yourself.” Outlived Flash itself.
1997Time Cube— Gene Ray's four-simultaneous-days manifesto; the web's great outsider artwork.
1996Berkshire HathawaySTILL LIVE— Warren Buffett's homepage: plain HTML, no stylesheet, several hundred billion dollars.
2005The Million Dollar HomepageSTILL LIVE— a student sold a million pixels at a dollar each; every ad is still there, most now pointing at ghosts.
2005Ling's CarsSTILL LIVE— the loudest website on Earth, entirely on purpose, gloriously undimmed.