What 1999 Internet Looked Like. A Deep Dive via Wayback.

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If you want to understand how much the web has changed, not just in design, but in purpose and feel, go back to 1999. That year sits at the edge of the dot-com boom, when websites were growing fast, design was chaotic, and nobody was thinking about mobile.

Thanks to archive.org’s Wayback Machine, we can still visit hundreds of those sites and experience the late 90s internet exactly as it was - blinking banners, guestbooks, frames and all.

How to Find 1999 Snapshots

Go to archive.org/web, type in any domain, and use the timeline to select 1999. Even big brands had small, flat websites then. It’s a completely different universe.

To dig deeper:

  • Try portals like yahoo.com, aol.com, or geocities.com

  • Visit early blogs, indie shops, and educational sites

  • Explore now-defunct services like Ask Jeeves, HotBot, or Tripod

Use the Wayback Domain Scanner if you want to see all pages captured in 1999 for a specific domain, it helps you avoid broken menus and dead ends.

What Web Design Looked Like

1999 was peak table-based layout. Expect:

  • Centered text

  • Bright background colors

  • Inline styles everywhere

  • Navigation menus made of GIFs

  • Frames splitting the page into scrollable chunks

There was little consistency - every site was handmade. Some had music autoplay, flashing text, or entire pages of spinning "under construction" signs.

Typography was minimal. Most people relied on system fonts like Arial or Times New Roman, and custom fonts were rendered as images.

To see these patterns in action, check any of the oldest websites still online or preserved in early snapshots.

Content Was Smaller, Simpler, and Weirder

Sites in 1999 loaded fast because they had to, most people were on dial-up. A homepage over 100 KB was considered bloated.

Popular content types:

  • Personal homepages with GIF-laden introductions

  • Company "About Us" pages written in the first person

  • FAQ sections instead of blogs

  • Guestbooks (open comment forms visible to everyone)

  • Contact pages with mailto links, no forms

Content was weird in the best way. It was often full of enthusiasm, inside jokes, and personality. It wasn’t written for Google - it was written for other people.

If you want to extract and read actual content from these pages, use the Text Extractor to filter out code and clutter.

How Brands and Products Looked in 1999

Even large companies had basic sites. Take a look at:

  • Amazon.com (books only, with a search bar and very little UI)

  • Microsoft.com (light grey background, chunky tables)

  • Sony, IBM, Apple - lots of blue text, gradient bars, and outdated logos

You can also explore how these brands evolved visually using the Domain Auditor, which shows design and structure shifts across time.

It’s fascinating to watch how often companies changed layouts in the early years, many redesigned every few months to keep up with trends.

Early Ecommerce and Media

Online shopping in 1999 was still experimental. You’d often see:

  • Item descriptions without images

  • Add-to-cart buttons that triggered popups

  • Long checkout forms with no security badges

  • No mobile experience, not even close

News sites were text-heavy. Some had headline tickers, printable versions, or multi-page articles broken up to reduce load times.

Audio and video? Rare. Most people didn’t have the bandwidth, and Flash hadn’t taken over yet. RealPlayer and Windows Media were dominant but slow.

Tools and Tech Behind the Scenes

What powered 1999 websites:

  • HTML 3.2 / 4.0

  • JavaScript 1.2 (often used for image rollovers or form validation)

  • No CSS frameworks

  • No CMS, everything was hand-coded

  • FTP for deployment

  • Guestbook scripts, Perl counters, and raw CGI forms

This meant every update required editing raw HTML and re-uploading via FTP - usually from a personal computer.

Webmasters would manually archive old news by renaming index.html to index-old.html and uploading a new version.

What We Can Learn from the 1999 Web

Looking back gives us perspective. The internet used to be:

  • Slower, but more personal

  • Ugly, but more honest

  • Static, but more creative

  • Limited, but less commercialized

People built their own sites, wrote their own code, and linked to each other - no algorithms, no feeds, no engagement traps.

You can compare that directly with how websites evolved in later years. Try loading 1999, 2005, and 2015 versions of a brand site using the Wayback Domain Scanner and see how everything got more polished and less fun.

Sites from 1999 are disappearing quickly. Many rely entirely on archive.org for preservation.

To help keep them alive:

  • Bookmark your favorite snapshots

  • Use Save Page Now on anything not yet archived

  • Rebuild a favorite site using static HTML

  • Share screenshots and links on modern platforms

If you’re working on a restoration, here’s how to export content from snapshots into WordPress or Publii - without losing the retro feel.

1999 was a messy, brilliant, transitional year for the internet. It was still experimental, still playful, still human. Thanks to archive.org, you can revisit that world, page by page.

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