Go way back in time.

I recently found this great website called Internet Archive:Wayback Machine. Basically it lets you see snapshots of different websites starting from 1996 to present day. I found this fascinating for at least two reasons.

  1. It’s fun. To see how Microsoft’s site looked back in 1996, or alpha version of Google.
  2. The other (more important aspect to me) is – this site is a great learning tool. Like in movies you can go back in time and jump between eras, see how the world changed. How sites we visit every day looked like few years ago. It may be eye-opening, especially for people designing web interfaces. It’s almost like archeology, it shows you how fashions changed, people went from dial-up to broadband, and I must say – all web sites I looked at, look now better that anywhere else in the past. I think it’s a good sign, that despite of fashions, being all webtwozeroish – usability improves.

 

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