The Internet is a Museum Now

Here's something that's genuinely weird about the internet: it never forgets, and sometimes it never changes. There are websites that were built in 1996, that haven't been updated since 2003, that are still online right now in 2026, preserved in amber like digital fossils. You can visit them. You can see what the internet looked like 30 years ago. You can click links that point to websites that no longer exist. You can experience the web as it was meant to be experienced: slow, confusing, and absolutely baffling by modern standards.

The most famous example is the Space Jam website. Space Jam was a movie released in 1996 that combined live action with animation and starred Michael Jordan playing basketball with cartoon characters. It's a movie that makes no sense. It's wonderfully weird. And the movie had a website. A website built in 1996 with HTML designed for that era. Tables for layout. GIFs everywhere. Animated logos. No CSS. No JavaScript. No responsive design (because responsive design didn't exist). Just raw, chunky HTML.

That website is still online. In 2026. Virtually unchanged. You can visit it right now. You can click the links. You can view the source code. You can see what web design looked like when web designers were basically making it up as they went along. Warner Bros. kept it online because it became a historical artifact. A time capsule of early web design.

But Space Jam isn't alone. There are thousands of websites from the 1990s and early 2000s still online. Some are still actively maintained because the content is valuable. Some are abandoned and just sitting there, untouched for decades, because the domain owner forgot about them or didn't bother to take them down. Some are preserved by archive.org, which has been copying websites since 1996 and maintaining a historical record of the entire internet's evolution.

If you want to experience what the internet was actually like, you don't have to imagine it. You can visit these websites. You can use the Wayback Machine on archive.org and see what any website looked like at any point in its history. You can see how Google looked in 1998 (simple, clean, barely changed since then). You can see how Yahoo looked in 2000 (a wall of text and links, organized chaos). You can see the evolution of web design, one screenshot at a time.

And there's something oddly moving about it. These websites are like internet archaeology. They show you how people thought about organizing information before mobile devices existed. Before smartphones changed everything. Before search engines became the dominant way people found things. Before social media existed. The internet of the 1990s was fundamentally different from the internet of today, and you can see that difference preserved in these old websites.

The Petting Zoo is another famous example. It's a website about weird, unusual animals and pets. It was designed in the mid-1990s and has barely changed. It's got animated GIFs, MIDI music, bright neon colors, and zero aesthetic sensibility by modern standards. But it's charming in its weirdness. And it's still online. You can still visit it. You can still navigate its bizarre layout and read about frogs and weird reptiles from a website that hasn't aged gracefully, hasn't been updated, and yet somehow still exists.

What's incredible about this is that these websites were never supposed to be permanent. The internet was supposed to be dynamic. Websites were supposed to be constantly updated, constantly changing, constantly improving. Nobody expected that a website from 1996 would still be accessible in 2026. Yet here we are. Not only are they still accessible, they're valuable as historical records.

Some people have started intentionally preserving the weird parts of the old internet. Museum exhibits have featured printouts of vintage websites. People have built replicas of old websites to show what they looked like. Archive.org now has billions of snapshots of websites throughout history. The early internet is becoming something we study and preserve, not something we just move past.

And there's something beautiful about that. It means the internet has history now. It means we can actually track how design has evolved. How the web has changed. How our collective thinking about information organization has shifted. Instead of the past disappearing, it's preserved. You can literally walk through the internet from 30 years ago and compare it to today.

I swear I'm not making this up: if you have 30 minutes and access to a computer, you can go visit the Space Jam website right now. You can experience the web as it was in 1996. You can see how different it was from what you're used to. You can understand, viscerally, how far we've come. And you can appreciate that some humans thought it was important enough to keep that digital artifact online forever.

The deeper story here is about digital preservation and institutional persistence. These websites exist because nobody bothered to take them down. The companies that owned them—some are still in business, some went bankrupt but the domain got picked up—just let these relics sit on web servers, unchanged and usually untrafficked. It's like finding a 1990s shopping mall frozen in time. The employees are long gone, the products are outdated, but the building still stands exactly as it was constructed.

What's wild is that visiting these sites is like a time capsule. You see design decisions that look absolutely bizarre to modern eyes. Blinking text. Animated GIFs. Comic Sans fonts. Nested HTML tables for layout. Hover effects that don't work on mobile. Flash-based navigation menus. These weren't bad design choices at the time—they were the cutting edge of what was possible and what was considered cool. But they're also museums now, archaeological records of how we thought about the internet in the 1990s. Every couple of years, someone writes an article about these frozen-in-time websites, they get a brief surge in traffic, then they return to their quiet existence. They're internet fossils.

Then vs Now: Web Design Evolution

In the 1990s, web design was basically complete chaos. There were no standards. There were no best practices. Designers were using HTML table tags to create layouts because CSS didn't exist or wasn't widely supported. Pages were filled with GIFs and bright colors. Navigation was confusing. Text was hard to read. Every website looked like it was designed by someone making it up as they went along, because they literally were.

By 2026, web design is sophisticated and standardized. We have CSS for styling. We have responsive design that works on any device size. We have accessibility standards that require sites to be usable by people with disabilities. We have performance standards that require sites to load quickly. We have testing frameworks and design systems and best practices that are documented and taught in schools. A modern website is the product of hundreds of hours of professional design, engineering, and testing.

But here's the weird part: the old websites are kind of charming in their chaos. They're more human. They're weirder. They feel like someone's personal art project instead of a corporate product. And they're preserved now, which means we can experience both eras. We can see how far we've come. And we can appreciate the strange beauty of early web design, knowing we'd never want to go back to it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What websites are from the 90s that still exist?

Many websites from the 1990s are still online today, including the Space Jam movie website (1996), The Petting Zoo, and various personal pages preserved on archive.org. These sites are preserved as historical artifacts of early web design and remain largely unchanged from their original creation, providing a fascinating window into how web design worked 30 years ago.

Is the Space Jam website still up?

Yes, the original Space Jam website from 1996 is still online and accessible. Warner Bros. kept it online as a historical curiosity and it became an internet icon—a perfectly preserved example of 1990s web design with its table-based layout, animated GIFs, and chunky geometric design.

Where can I see old websites from the 90s?

The Wayback Machine (archive.org) has archived billions of web pages and allows you to see what websites looked like at specific points in their history. You can search for any major website and see snapshots from the 1990s, 2000s, and every year since. This is the primary tool for exploring internet history and understanding how web design has evolved.

Why are old websites still online?

Some old websites are maintained because the content is still valuable or the domain owner simply never took them down. Others are intentionally preserved by archive.org as historical records of the internet's evolution. A few have become internet icons (like Space Jam) and are kept online specifically because of their historical significance as examples of early web design.