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19 Category · Internet Classics

Internet Classics

Heritage websites still online — the founders, the survivors, the sites that built the modern web. Curated since 2013.

What this is

The Internet Classics category at BoredomBash collects historically significant websites that are still online and still worth visiting in 2026. info.cern.ch — Tim Berners-Lee's first website from August 6, 1991, still live at its original URL. Symbolics.com — the first .com domain ever registered (March 15, 1985). The Hampster Dance (1998) and Zombo.com (1999) — proto-weird canon still serving the same content they did in the late 1990s. ACME.com — "purveyors of fine freeware since 1972, on the net since 1991." Yahoo! — started as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in 1994. Internet Archive / Wayback Machine — Brewster Kahle's 1996 archive that now preserves much of the rest of the web. Sixteen featured below; the full category contains over thirty.

The editorial line: Internet Classics aren't just old. They're sites that endured AND stayed good or culturally significant. That distinction matters.

The directory · 16 entries

Hand-picked internet classics

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    Curator's pick

    info.cern.ch

    info.cern.ch is our category pick. The literal first website, written by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1991, still online at its original URL — redirected to an archive maintained by CERN that preserves the original 1991 page describing what the World Wide Web project was. The site has no styling, no images, no JavaScript. It's pure HTML and hyperlinks, which is exactly what the web was designed to be. The editorial reasoning: visiting info.cern.ch is one of the few experiences on the modern web that's both genuinely historically significant and immediately accessible. You're reading the same words the first web visitor read in August 1991. The hyperlinks still work. The structure is identical to what every website since has copied. For anyone who wants to feel the medium's origins concretely, this is the destination. CERN restored the page to its original 1991 appearance in 2013 as a 25th-anniversary project. Berners-Lee himself was knighted in 2004 for the work the site represents. The site is essentially a museum exhibit you can visit from anywhere on the internet, free, with no signup, in your browser.

    For the heritage visit

    Best for the heritage visit.

    For internet history you can experience directly:

    info.cern.ch — Tim Berners-Lee's 1991 first website, original page restored.

    Internet Archive — Brewster Kahle's 1996 web archive, the canonical Wayback Machine.

    Yahoo! original directory — surviving directory format from Yahoo's 1994 origins.

    The Million Dollar Homepage — Alex Tew's 2005 student-loan pixel grid, still preserved.

    Cool Site of the Day — Glenn Davis's 1994 daily-pick site, ancestor of the Webby Awards.

      For the proto-weird-web canon

      Best for the proto-weird-web canon.

      For sites that started genres still influential today:

      The Hampster Dance — 1998, dancing hamsters since launch.

      Zombo.com — 1999, single Flash voice loop now in HTML5, "the infinite is possible."

      ACME.com — registered 1991, "purveyors of fine freeware since 1972."

      Newgrounds — 1995, Tom Fulp's animation-and-game hub, foundational to Flash culture.

      The Onion — online since 1996, satirical news that defined the genre.

        Related categories

        Other rooms of internet heritage

        Useless Websites Weird Websites Hidden Gems Funny Websites Live Webcams Time Wasters

        More about this · tap to expand

        Editorial criteria What makes a website an Internet Classic. Read more

        Three editorial criteria.

        Genuine historical significance. The site has to mean something to internet history — it was the first of something, it broke ground in some specific way, or it represents a moment in the medium's development. info.cern.ch (the literal first website) is the obvious example. The Trojan Coffee Pot at Cambridge (first webcam, 1991) qualifies even though it's offline now (we list its archive). Yahoo!'s founding URL qualifies because the site shaped how directories worked in the early web.

        Still online and still functional. Sites that have gone dark don't qualify even if historically significant — Internet Classics is about heritage you can still visit today. The Wayback Machine archives go in the Hidden Gems cross-reference if their archive value is the point. For this category, the live site is the bar.

        Still worth visiting. Some old sites are technically online but have become unrecognizable from their original form (the modern Yahoo!.com bears almost no resemblance to the 1994 directory). We list sites that either retain their historical character (Hampster Dance, Zombo.com still serving the same content from the 1990s) OR have evolved while remaining culturally significant (Wikipedia, Internet Archive). Sites that survived but became something else entirely don't qualify in their current form.

        Cultural context A short history of the early web. Read more

        The web has a clearly-dated origin. December 1990: Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN with Robert Cailliau, builds the first web browser and server. August 6, 1991: the first website goes live at info.cern.ch — a brief explanation of what the World Wide Web project was. The site still exists at the original URL, redirected to a CERN-maintained archive. Less than 1% of the world's population had internet access in 1995; by 2018 that figure was 40%; by 2026, internet access has reached over 70% of the global population.

        The pre-1995 era is well-documented because it was small. Wikipedia maintains a list of websites founded before 1995 — a finite enumerable list. Some standouts: Symbolics.com (March 1985, first .com — predates the web itself), Cool Site of the Day (Glenn Davis, August 1994 — became the Webby Awards), The Nine Planets (Bill Arnett, 1994 — first multimedia astronomy site), The Amazing FishCam (Lou Montulli at Netscape, second live webcam after the Cambridge coffee pot).

        The 1995-2000 era is the "early web" most internet adults remember. Yahoo! (1994 → went public 1996), Newgrounds (Tom Fulp, 1995), Craigslist (Craig Newmark, 1995), Drudge Report (1995), Internet Archive (Brewster Kahle, 1996), The Onion online (1996), Slashdot (1997). The Hampster Dance (1998) and Zombo.com (1999) launched the proto-weird-web genre that still influences sites built today.

        The 2000-2010 era brought the web's first generation of cultural artifacts that have become Internet Classics in retrospect. Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales + Larry Sanger, 2001 — now the most-visited reference site in the world). The Million Dollar Homepage (Alex Tew, 2005 — still preserved, still pixelated). Reddit (2005), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006). Many of these are still operating but in such different form from their launches that we don't list current incarnations as "classics" — they're modern sites that happen to be old. What ended up in this category is the working subset of internet heritage you can still meaningfully visit.

        Editorial standards How we curate. Read more

        Quarterly editorial review with monthly link checks (link rot is unusually high here — old sites disappear when domain renewals lapse or hosting changes). Reader submissions through /submit/ with about 16% acceptance rate. We don't take paid placements. The category is unusual in that we cross-reference Wikipedia's List of websites founded before 1995 to verify dates and historical claims — a lot of "oldest website" claims circulating online don't survive scrutiny.

        If you liked this If you liked this, try… Read more

        Useless Websites (where Hampster Dance and Zombo.com also appear — the proto-weird canon overlaps), Weird Websites (some 1990s sites have become weird-by-virtue-of-having-not-changed-in-30-years), and Hidden Gems (where some Internet Classics live when their value is more "underrated" than "historical"). Outside our directory, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the canonical resource for visiting versions of sites that have changed substantially or gone offline.

        FAQ · People also ask

        Questions about this category.

        What is the oldest website still online?

        The oldest still-online website is info.cern.ch — Tim Berners-Lee's first website, launched August 6, 1991, currently maintained by CERN as a restored archive of the original page. It predates every commercial site on the internet. The oldest .com domain still active is Symbolics.com (registered March 15, 1985), though the current site bears little resemblance to its original form. The oldest continuously-running webcam is FogCam at San Francisco State University (1994, still online in 2026).

        What was the first website?

        info.cern.ch, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Berners-Lee began the World Wide Web project in late 1989, built the first web server and browser in December 1990, and made the first website publicly available on August 6, 1991. The original page was a brief explanation of what the World Wide Web project was — essentially a meta-page describing the medium it ran on. The site is still online at the original URL, restored to its 1991 appearance by CERN as a 25th-anniversary project in 2013.

        When did the internet start?

        Two different dates depending on what you mean. The internet itself (the network of networks) began as ARPANET in October 1969 — the first message was sent between UCLA and Stanford on October 29, 1969. The World Wide Web (the browseable hyperlinked layer most people mean by "internet") started December 1990 with Tim Berners-Lee's work at CERN, with the first website going live August 1991. The modern consumer web is usually dated to 1993-1995 when graphical browsers (Mosaic in 1993, Netscape Navigator in 1994) made the web accessible to non-technical users.

        What's the oldest .com domain?

        Symbolics.com, registered March 15, 1985. Symbolics was a Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer (now defunct, acquired by an investor group in Dallas). The original domain remained continuously registered and is now a sort of digital museum of itself. Hover.com maintains a list of the oldest registered .com domains, and the early ones from 1985-1987 are well-documented: BBN.com, Think.com, MCC.com, ITCorp.com, BoraVet.com, and a small set of others all date from that era.

        Are old websites still online?

        Many are, more than people expect. Wikipedia maintains a list of websites founded before 1995 showing dozens of pre-1995 sites still operating. Some retain their original character (Hampster Dance still serves dancing hamsters from 1998; Zombo.com still loops "the infinite is possible" from 1999). Others have evolved beyond recognition (Yahoo! today bears no resemblance to its 1994 directory). The Wayback Machine archives older versions of sites that have changed substantially.

        What's the Internet Archive?

        The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, hosted in San Francisco. Its most famous service is the Wayback Machine — a tool that captures and stores snapshots of websites over time, currently archiving over 800 billion web pages. The Archive also hosts millions of digitized books, films, audio recordings, and software. Free to use, accepts donations, run as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It's one of the most important institutions on the modern web — without it, much of the early internet would simply be gone.

        What was the first social media site?

        SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997 by Andrew Weinreich, is generally cited as the first recognizably-modern social media site — it had user profiles and friend lists and let users send messages within a network. SixDegrees shut down in 2001. Friendster (2002) and MySpace (2003) followed; Facebook launched in 2004. Earlier proto-social-media systems (BBS networks, Usenet groups, IRC, WELL) date back to the 1980s but they're forum-style rather than profile-and-friends-list-style social media.

        Why are old websites still online?

        Three main reasons. Owner inertia: many early-internet domains remain registered because the original owners (or their estates) keep paying renewal fees, often nominal in cost. Historical preservation: institutions (CERN with info.cern.ch, archive.org, Cool Site of the Day) deliberately maintain their old sites as cultural artifacts. Active business operations: some 1990s sites are still operating businesses (ACME.com still distributes freeware; Drudge Report still publishes; Internet Archive still archives). The cost of keeping a basic website online is low enough that survival is more about caring than capacity.

        How do I find more internet history?

        Three solid resources. Wikipedia's list of websites founded before 1995 is the canonical inventory with dates and descriptions. The Internet Archive preserves older versions of sites that have evolved or gone offline — the Wayback Machine at archive.org is the single most useful internet history tool. Computer history museums (Computer History Museum in Mountain View; The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park) maintain physical and digital exhibits about the early internet. For specific topics, Reddit's r/InternetHistory and various academic-archive projects (Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center papers, ACM Digital Library) provide deeper dives.

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