404PageFound.com Showcases Active Websites from the 1990's

Oct. 18, 2009 - PRLog -- There were an estimated 100,000 websites in 1996, and close to 1 million in 1997. Many of these still remain in their original coding, although the vast majority have been removed or completely renovated. 404PageFound.com strives to excavate and display these remaining buried gems of the Internet.

404PageFound.com started in May 2009 with the goal of uncovering dated (generally sites from 1994-2000) websites that are still active and have avoided major updates. Plenty of data from the days of Usenet, Gopher, and FTPs still exists in the backwoods of the Internet and is waiting to be found. That's where 404PageFound.com comes to the rescue.

To further clarify, 404PageFound.com is by no means an attempt to emulate the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (or any other site that hosts former pages). Like the Wayback Machine, 404PageFound.com serves an excellent and necessary purpose by capturing instances of websites for historical, technological, and cultural purposes. However, there is something distinct and unique about discovering an antiquated site that still exists in its natural state compared to browsing a library of how modern websites once looked. As such, 404PageFound.com will not be able to showcase most major web players since they constantly update their sites. However, large sites (CNN, Yahoo!, and Business Week, to name a few) have old pages that remain in their original layout and have escaped deletion from the servers.

Additionally, 404PageFound.com is in no way a “worst” of the web aggregator. There are already plenty of these sites and no one benefits by insulting historic websites (many of which have been abandoned or forgotten as it is). In fact, many of the featured sites actually earned “Best of the Web” awards back in the day. In today’s advanced Internet, such vintage sites would not, and do not, stand a chance of receiving awards. One of the goals of 404PageFound.com is to entertain as well as enlighten visitors who rarely stray from modern “2.0″ sites. Plenty of throwback sites remain scattered around the Web. It is just a matter of finding them in a world dominated by “Page Not Found” errors.

A typical entry for a webpage will consist of the title, screenshot, URL, designer, year created, year updated, source, and a brief description of what makes the site stand out. In addition, user submissions are readily accepted and displayed using a simple form, thus adding to the overall experience. A combination of a few factors make a website eligible for 404PageFound.com:

  1. A site created between 1994-1997 is ideal, but 1998-2001 can work as well.
  2. Site last modified pre-2005, assuming it has a creation date from the mid-1990’s
  3. Graphics: site cannot be plain text, or an archive of e-mail/newsgroup postings
  4. Contains only HTML, CGI, Perl, or early Java (no PHP or CSS elements)
  5. Page source code contains old date for confirmation, or old publishing tsoftware/browser citation
  6. Utilizes old HTML methods and tags: animation, font-size, tables, frames
  7. Clearly optimized for limited bandwidth (low-resolution graphics, simple layout)
  8. Site received an Internet award in its prime (”Site of the Day”, etc.)
  9. No social media whatsoever (apart from Guestbook or Bookmark links)
 10. Content is written by the author for an audience – no user generated content

404PageFound.com is a testament to the fact that decade-old pages can still co-exist with the dominant social web. Many of these featured sites suffer from “link rot” or the gradual loss of links (and therefore search engine presence) because websites that they link to disappear, change their content, or move to new locations. Such is the case in the realm of the Internet. Forgotten pages may exist, but it takes a certain knack and some detective work to find them. That’s where we come in.

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404PageFound started in 2009 with the goal of uncovering dated websites (generally from 1994-2000) that are still active and have avoided major updates. 404PageFound is a showcase of sites - not an archive.