For every new website that goes up, there are some like these that get lost or forgotten – along with a sense of what online culture used to look like. We may have faster network speeds and better web features now, but – like finding an old mixtape (yes, on actual cassette tape) – finding a webpage dating back to the turn of the century is like unearthing King Tut’s tomb.
And there’s something about those artifacts that’s worth preserving, whether it’s a promo site for the 1996 film Space Jam (above) full of twinkling-little-stars backdrop and spinning GIFs, a virtual “mall” promoting Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, or a collection of (now-nearly-obsolete) “Enter” pages. Some of these gems are easy to find, but others are not, and there’s always a chance that some may disappear from the web forever and while the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has logs of more than 240 billion pages and counting, but it probably can’t save everything.
