Remarkable Images Show How Your Favorite Websites Looked the Day They Were Created

Impact
By Matt Essert

On Friday, the Internet Archive announced a major milestone for the Wayback Machine, a project which allows you to search almost any website and see what it looked like on any day since its inception. The Archive has added 400 billion additional indexed web pages, encompassing pages dating as far back as 1996.

For reference, estimates put the current number of web pages at 2.15 billion, which means the Internet Archives has approximately 200 historical indexes of each page. With the new collection, you can see what the New York Times was talking about on any given day, or just take a step back in time to see what AOL.com looked like 15 years ago.

To get a sense of what the Internet used to look like, here's a selection of some of the earliest available indexes of a variety of websites.

1. AOL.com — Dec. 20, 1996

2. Apple.com — April 4, 1997

3. New York Times.com — Nov. 12, 1996

Also interesting to see: NewYorkTimes.com on 9/11/01

4. Sony.com — Oct. 26, 1996

5. Backstreetboys.com — Oct. 29, 1996

6. Harvard.edu — May 11, 1997

7. CNN.com — Aug. 15, 2000

8. Fox News.com — Oct. 22, 1996

9. Yahoo.com — Oct. 17, 1996

10. Google.com — Dec. 2, 1998

11. NFL.com — Jan. 4, 1997

12. Whitehouse.gov — Oct. 23, 1997

13. Twitter.com — Nov. 16, 2006

14. Gawker.com — Feb. 7, 2003

15. Buzzfeed.com — Dec. 1, 2006

16. Huffington Post.com — May 9, 2005

17. Drudge Report.com — Jan. 27, 1999

Though it doesn't look much different today: