【Redemption Porn Movie】

In Tales of the Early Internet,Redemption Porn Movie Mashable explores online life through 2007 — back before social media and the smartphone changed everything.

---

The year was 1999: Cher’s "Believe" was blasting on pop radio stations, Bill Clinton was impeached, Jar Jar Binks hit the Big Screen, and the beep, beep, static of dial-up internet echoed in family rooms across the globe.

The World Wide Web was still young then — gawky, awkward, and painfully slow. The dot-com bubble was still growing, on the cusp of bursting. The public had been using the internet for under a decade and those making online content (before we even called it content en masse) were often just throwing stuff at the wall.

---

You May Also Like

---

---

"The 1990s were marked by exploring the possibilities of graphic design on the web and searching for ways how to approach web design, since at that time the vast majority of web designers only had experience with the design of printed material," Petr Kovar, the founder of the Web Design Museum, which curates online exhibits about sites from the ‘90s and early aughts, told Mashable in an email.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

Many websites today look the same because there is greater "emphasis on accessibility, applicability, and UX at the expense of visual originality," Kovar said. That’s not a bad thing, added the UX designer based in Prague, but it does leave web designers from the ‘90s like him pining for colorful backgrounds and Comic Sans. Although, that aesthetic wasn't embraced by corporate brands, with many like Amazon, AOL, and AltaVista opting for box grids and just a splash of color just before the new millennium. (AOL was the most vibrant of the bunch at the time.)

While many services archive the web, like the Internet Archive with its influential Wayback Machine, Kovar organizes the historical snapshots to provide better context about the internet’s past. Want to see what porn, music, movie, and soccer websites looked like decades ago? Kovar’s museum has a sampling. The museum also has a collection of search engines from the ‘90s, many of which you’ve probably never heard of. After all, Rough Guides, the travel guidebook brand, didn’t include Google in the indexof its internet guidebook in 1999. (Yes, people wrote books for internet tourists back then.)

---

Related Stories

---

• Switch back to the old Twitter bird logo from X with this iOS feature
• 'Groundhog Day' VR game let's you revisit Bill Murray's 1993 adventure as his son
• Diablo IV players are loving the nostalgia, but hating the glitches
• TikTok's nostalgia-fueled obsession with the early 2000s
• 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem' review: An action-packed, utterly goofy nostalgia trip

SEE ALSO: HOTorNOT: The forgotten website that shaped the internet

"The generation of internet users born after 2000 has only a very vague idea of what websites looked like in the 1990s and around the year 2000," Kovar said.

Let’s fix that. To freshen our memories and give the TikTok teens an internet history lesson, below are a selection of homepages from 1999. Some are in Kovar's collection, some I had to hunt for using the Wayback Machine. (For even more of a trip, visit the Web Design Museum directly.) You can see shades of the current Google in its 30-year-old snapshot, but Apple's is worlds away from today. And the White House homepage, yeesh.

AltaVista was the search engine my family used in the '90s. It was founded in 1995, bought by Yahoo in 2003, and then shuttered in 2013. It had strong grid energy in 1999. Credit: Web Design Museum Amazon had already expanded beyond books into electronics and other goods by 1999. Its homepage back then was filled with blue hyperlinks. Today, it's all slick and shiny with lots of product cards. Credit: Web Design Museum AOL sure loved vertical columns in 1999. It still has a homepage today, but it's filled with so many more images and video. Credit: Internet Archive In 1999, Apple had a "Hot News Headlines" section on its homepage. Now its homepage is all bold colors and feels like the spirit of Helvetica. Credit: Web Design Museum Jeeves was still around in 1999. The search engine once hosted by a cheery butler is now just called Ask.com after it got steamrolled by Google. Credit: Web Design Museum When's the last time you heard someone mention the metasearch engine that used to fetch answers to web queries? Like so many other homepages of 1999, Dogpile was covered in blue hyperlink. Credit: Web Design Museum Awww look at 4-year-old Ebay, with its funky fonts and colors. Those random capital letters are giving me extreme early internet vibes. Credit: Web Design Museum On a non-doodle day, Google's homepage doesn't look that drastically different from 1999. (Minus that big Beta.) Credit: Web Design MuseUM MSN's 1999 homepage has the same love for grids as AltaVista and so many other websites back then. Credit: Internet Archive Back in 1994, the Clinton Administration launched the first White House Website. By 1999, when Clinton was still in office, it looked like a sad, brown sack. Nowadays, the White House website looks like it was based off a premium Wordpress theme, and it is constantly losing links to scientific information about climate change. Credit: Internet Archive Yahoo bought Geocities in 1999 for $4 billion. The popular site, with its themed communities, was at one point the third most visited website on the web. RIP. Credit: Web Design Museum

• Science
• Social Good
• Digital Culture
• Entertainment
• Tech
• Life
• Games
• Deals

• Best laptop deal: Save $390.99 on the Lenovo IdeaPad 3i
• Best earbuds deal: Save $50 on Beats Studio Buds
• Best earbuds deal: Save $50 on Beats Studio Buds
• NYT Connections hints and answers for February 17: Tips to solve 'Connections' #617.
• Broncos vs. Bills 2025 livestream: How to watch NFL online
• Odds of asteroid's impact keep going up — just as scientists expected
• Best Buy Presidents' Day deals 2025: Apple, Dyson, Bose, and more
• Best Presidents' Day 2025 deals: Mattresses, Apple, Dyson, Samsung, and more
• Ruggable x Jonathan Adler launch: See the new designs
• Best Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro deal: Get them for $134.99

• 'Teen Accounts' now an Instagram requirement for users under 16
• Today's Hurdle hints and answers for September 19
• Apple may be forced to stop blocking third parties from accessing Siri and more
• Best Amazon deals of the day: Roku Ultra, TP
• Why Moo Deng, the adorable baby hippo, and other cute animals rule the internet
• MrBeast, Logan Paul and KSI launch Lunchables rival Lunchly
• Monaco vs. Barcelona 2024 livestream: Watch Champions League for free
• Apple's iPadOS 18 is causing big problems for some iPad owners
• When does October Prime Day start? The dates are out.
• Club Brugge vs. Borussia Dortmund 2024 livestream: Watch Champions League for free

• Trump's foreign aid freeze halts funding for digital diplomacy bureau
• Best Le Creuset deals: 40% off at Williams Sonoma
• Best AirTag deal: Save $30 at Amazon
• BAFTAs 2025: The complete list of winners
• Best MacBook deal: Save $200 on 2024 M3 MacBook Air
• Best Presidents' Day deal: Save $250 on Peloton Bike
• Best Samsung Presidents' Day deals: Save on The Frame TV, Galaxy Buds, and more
• Best Eufy robot vacuum deal: Get the Omni C20 for $250 off
• The White House might have inflated Trump's golf record, because this is how we live now
• Best Presidents' Day Walmart deals: Save on tablets, TVs, and more

• NYT Connections hints and answers for January 20: Tips to solve 'Connections' #589.
• Best Roomba deal: Roomba Combo j5 hits new record
• Best mouse deal: Get the Logitech G502 gaming mouse for 47% off
• iPhone 16e vs iPhone 16: What are the differences?
• Roborock Saros Z70 at CES 2025: A huge flex
• PSV vs. Juventus 2025 livestream: Watch Champions League for free
• Comparing AI features for Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder
• Best Presidents' Day mattress deals 2025: Purple, Avocado, Bear, Nectar, and more
• Three Apps to Combine All Your Messaging Clients Into One
• 'SNL50': The 12 best sketches you need to watch