Built for people who remember when “view source” was an education.
OW The Old Web True stories from the strange early internet.
Stories from when websites were uploaded by hand, search engines could be frightened, and somebody always knew a bloke with a Perl script.
Submit a story
Pull up a beige chair. These are true little stories from people who built, broke, ranked, hosted and accidentally monetised the early web—and a living archive of internet history told by the people who were there.

Popular early-web stories

What the old hands are remembering today
5 old hands

Play 8 Questions & Win a Domino’s Pizza!

I wanted to learn .NET MVC, so I decided to make it a little fun. I built a deadly little game where you have to answer 8 questions. Answer each question within 8 seconds: ✅ Correct: +3 ❌ Incorrect: -1 ⏭️ Skipped: 0 And the best part? The person at the top of the scoreboard wins…

3 old hands

Webrings

Back when Google was in its infancy, Yahoo was meh, and AskJeeves was just terrible, we had webrings. You'd find a site on something you were interested in, and at the bottom of the page, there'd be a thing saying the name of the webring that site belonged to, along with "back"…

3 old hands

I made a site on Tripod that was totally pink

I had an idea to interview everyone I knew and publish them online, but first I needed a site. I picked Tripod and for some reason made it completely pink. Every single thing. Pink. None of my friends even had the internet, but I only managed to talk two people into letting me i…

3 old hands

I uploaded 10000 doorway pages, 5 at a time

Back around 2000 I built a batch-file landing page generator. It took keywords, HTML templates, affiliate links and banners, then spat out 1000's of pages. Uploaded them through Silicon Valley Web Hosting's upload form 5 at a time. They’d mostly rank #1 or #2 in Google, and my k…

2 old hands

The Borg Collective

Before Spotify, before YouTube and even before BitTorrent took over, I spent time in an mIRC community called The Borg Collective. It was one of those underground IRC chat rooms where people gathered to chat, queue for downloads and share huge collections of MP3 files. If you wa…

1 old hands

I made a Flash website

Flash website: select a navigation button,a trapdoor opens and the button drops through and is left hanging. Added accompanying chain creaking sounds effects when the trap was reset and the button was "reeled" back onto the navigation area. The trap is reset, ready for it's next…