Cleaning out a desk last week, I stumbled across a disk containing one of the very first websites I ever made. Which I had planned to upload to our web server and link to so everyone could have a good, jolly laugh at, except I can’t find a way to get it off a 3.5″ floppy. Lord knows how I’m ever going to look at all the crap I’ve got backed up on 44MB SyQuest discs.

In any event, the gem in question hails from an era when websites all needed to be compliant with a mostly-forgotten browser named Mosaic, as Netscape 1.0 hadn’t yet been widely adopted by anyone other than us cutting edge web designer types, and Microsoft hadn’t even entered the browser market yet. When, in fact, the job description of website designer meant someone who handled all aspects of creating a site: design, coding, front end, back end, content development, hosting and so on. The concept of Information Architecture hadn’t been coined yet. The best connection you could hope for was 28.8 kilobits per second with a modem that sounded like a fax machine having a seizure.

The date on the disk: April 1994.

Holy crap, thought I. Fifteen years? That’s long enough for retro-nostalgic flashbacks, the way Happy Days celebrated the 50’s in the 70’s and parachute pants from the 80’s tried (and failed) to make a comeback in the 00’s. But I’m sad to admit, I couldn’t think of a single site I remembered visiting regularly in 1994. In my defense, I believe that’s largely because there just wasn’t anything with a lot of visit-more-than-once stickiness at that point in time. So I decided to put a little genuine effort into recalling my earliest World Wide Web memories. Here’s what I came up with.

	Yahoo! Before Google come online in 1998, you found crap on the web with Yahoo. And not the fancy, schmancy news aggregating Yahoo you see today if you accidentally misspell ‘Google’. Old school Yahoo, with their special listings of ‘New’ and ‘Cool’ sites, and a logo they tried to cutesify for holidays the way Google still (groan) does.
	Suck. from 1995 through 2001, Suck offered daily commentary on the world at large. Clever, current and embracing the wonderous power of inline hyperlinking like no editorial before its time, Suck was the original real-whilst-eating-lunch-at-your-desk workplace distraction. Their full archives are still available at suck.com.
	Amazon. In 1994, conventional wisdom scoffed at the notion that people would ever buy things they couldn’t pick up and hold in their hands before handing over their credit card information. Because, you know, catalog business had been shown to be such an utter failure. Amazon started out with books and CDs – if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all – at stupid-cheap prices. I think they may still be around.
	Doodie. Every day, a new animated gif (cutting edge stuff in 1995) celebrating the evacuation of one’s bowels. Nuff said. There’s still something there, but it ain’t what it used to be. I don’t understand how this didn’t make it as big as Amazon.
	Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers. If for no other reason, you have to love it for concise branding. You know, I’d've sworn I remembered looking at this site once or twice a week while working at a job I left in ‘98. But after confirming with it’s instigator, one Jaimie Muelhausen of Contusion Creative Studio, it’s public debut wasn’t until 2001. So much for the reliability of memory.