Time Travel The Internet View Any Website From Almost Any Year
Visit archive.org
Using your browser, navigate to Archive.org.
Enter the website you’d like to view and click Browse History
I decided to check out Amazon’s humble roots since I’ve been reading the Jeff Bezos biography One Click.
Select a year
The Archive.org meta crawler visits popular sites more often. Each blue circular bubble indicates that a snapshot exists. In my case I searched for Amazon, the 7th most popular site on the web; this explains the blue blur that you see below.
You might notice by the “annual” snapshot bar graphs that overall snapshots have increased over the years — this is due to hard drive space becoming less expensive, resulting in more crawls being possible. After all, each snapshot isn’t just a mere image — it’s an explorable version of the site.
From here, you can either select a blue bubble to view the relevant snapshot or choose a different year to view. Let’s go deeper. Select an older year.
Select a snapshot
After you’ve selected the year, find the specific date you’d like to explore. Explorable dates are denoted by the blue bubble. A larger bubble means that multiple snapshots exist for that date. Click on a date bubble.
Bask in the glory of old design
It’s interesting to see not only how web design has changed but also how far we’ve come in such a short period of time.
Amazon in 1996: See it in action