Hey, WaybackProxy author here. Thanks for featuring my work. I had originally started working on it for the same reason you've gone through - there's such a magic element to the 2000s Web that I grew up with. It really is a bummer that the Wayback Machine doesn't archive more complex Flash and Java stuff, but I did my best to try and fill in gaps in images and such. With all this attention, I'm planning on making improvements to the proxy in the near future, like a Dockerfile for easy installation, and maybe a better API for the Time Machine to communicate with.
Honestly doing God's work with this proxy, the fact you made it much easier to look at older websites is so cool! I do have a suggestion for a feature that I'm not sure if it's possible or not- adding a randomizer to the proxy so that you could press a button and go to any site that was captured on a specific day
ruffle is becoming a more popular browser embedded flash emulator but it currenttly only supports games programmed in Actionscript 1 and 2 so your mileage may vary
Very cool project! Just a thought, which might be way to complicated: Do you think it's doable to add more flash games to the old webpages by using the archives of BlueMaxima's Flashpoint to fill some more gaps? I can see it being a problem if websites all used different, custom names for the same flashprograms, but maybe it's not that bad . If it is causing problems, users could select a game from potential matches. And if you want to go all in: these manual selections could be saved which could be shared with a public database, smoothing out the experience over time.
Just think about the academic research that can take place!!!! Just think how confusing the ending citation would be for a webpage that no longer exists!! It is so wonderful!!!
Your internet time machine can have practical uses in the film & television industry since it makes accurate depictions of technologies during the 1990s to early 2000s, which can be very helpful for historical dramas/docudramas.
I thought about using it to fake an old video as a joke, adding visual effects as if it were recorded in an old device but the film industry could actually use old devices to record stuff, then digitalize it and it'd look amazing. God, I really hope this goes far and becomes a staple for epoch films and recreating stuff, I mean, have you guys watched Weezer's video of take on me with Calpurnia acting as Weezer?(the lead singer of Calpurnia is the main character in stranger things and he plays Rivers Cuomo) imagine how it'd look like if they added those details instead of shooting in full HD
If you provide a tutorial, I'd be really interested to try and build this little time machine! I work at a public library, and I think patrons would have a lot of fun if we had an "internet time machine" to try out.
OMG YES that would be the COOLEST thing! I've never seen something like that in a library, heck I never thought of that as a possibility. Just the fact that you brought this up makes me 🤯🤯🤯🤯 When you get that installed, I will WANT to come to your library 🤩
YES that would be perfect for a library libraries are already known for info so having a internet time machine in libraries would probably be a good way to modernize them
I agree! A tutorial with a basic gloss-over on how to do it all would be awesome. Otherwise you will be bombarded with people wanting YOU to build one for them! I would be one of them. :D
Well the shift from desktop browser design to mobile compatible design is what really destroyed 2000s era web design. That's why youtube got rid of custom backgrounds on channels. There are of course more factors than just that but I think it's a big part.
Plenty of websites had mobile version even back then but they were usually a separate URL. These days, or as of 2010, most websites want the main site to be mobile formatted out of convenience.
You can also thank Susan for a lot of the "improvements" she shoved down our throats. Remember the new lay-out designs after 2012? The forced Google+ integration? RU-vid Heroes?
In b4 10,000,000 views. This project is pretty incredible! It doesn’t have to be complex to be a well executed good idea. I’m old, lol, but I lived through all of the eras of the internet you showed off. I feel like you hit the nail on the head with just about everything you had to say… …including your dislike for… some executions of “material design”. I hated when that era began.
I agree with you. Also, the modern internet now has so much unnecessary javascript running. I miss simple webpages with complicated visual design, rather than the complicated frameworks running on something like a recipe website.
@@can2835 Yes!!! Web pages are still too slow for computing power today. Latency is unsolvable yes, but there are far too many websites simply which are simply an excuse for bad programming
20 years from now: “I built a time machine that reminded me of what it was like to be in VR for the first time. It’s not as interesting anymore now that we’re in it 24/7.”
@@lopiklop until it becomes effortless to use, solves the space problem somehow and has a use that's specific and exclusive to VR (and I don't mean a game), VR will never be the future. Its going to constantly be the "next big thing" that isn't happening yet. VR is amazing to use but the amount of hurdles it has to overcome to reach that level of ubiquity is far greater than the Internet ever had.
I love how old logos and websites look and really want that retro skeuomorphic look of web design to return because my god it looked so much cooler. This time machine is incredible!! Really wish that most websites worked or that the style would transfer over to current day technology, but hey, I'm not a smart guy and don't know how things work haha. Awesome video!
This really does bring back so many memories of going online in the 90's, and early 00's when it really was an event using dial-up. I met so many people during that time in chat rooms, some I'm still friends with, and even my long time girlfriend in the finally days of Yahoo chats. I'm for sure going to be looking into this with my Pentium 4 retro gaming system that dual boots 98se, and XP. 👍🏻
Hearing a recording of a modem handshake still brings back those memories of being excited to play Flash games and the like :D (though I did have half of our 4GB drive dedicated to cached flash games… and another 1.5GB dedicated to CD game installs, lol. Every text file was saved to floppy disks instead of the HDD 😅)
There were so many tight communities and interesting people on early IRC chat channels. I remember chatting every day with the guitarist for Jefferson Starship’s touring band on an obscure Apple Mac channel with maybe 100-200 regulars. (sadly, he recently passed away)
@@AdamsBrew78I'm almost 41 now, and I can say It was even tighter pre-internet in the BBS, and Q-Link(Quantium Link) days of the late 80's - very early 90's with even less people being online, and I was very lucky to have experienced that as well having my own phone line extension in my bed room with a 1200 Baud Commodore modem I used with my C64, and later C128(never had a modem for my Apple IIe sadly), and there is still one person from those days I keep up with from time to time via email, as he hates modern social media, and I honestly can't blame him. BTW: I also worked for the old US Lycos chats for a couple years back in the very early 00's as an SOS Chat host/moderator, and I still have the pale blue coffee mug they sent me with the old black lab mascot, as they used vetted Lycos chat users that worked from home to be SOS Host to cut down on cost, and while their chat rooms are Long gone, they are somehow still hanging in there as a search engine, and email provider with my Lycos email still working I made all those years ago lol!
@@CommodoreFan64The first BBS I ever dialed into was run on a C64. I had a crush on the sysop’s daughter ;) … I entirely missed the 80s heyday of BBS, as I didn’t discover them until I was around 12 in 1990. You’re right though, they were very tight communities - Sysops often held real life meetups since most users were local. Even met some RL friends through my own WWIV BBS. Good times!
I hate modern web design with a passion. I hate pop-ups asking for cookies, ads in the middle if articles, and several javascript trackers slowing down the page. Early to mid 2010s web was the peak in my opinion. I however don't mind full page images when done right, like apples site lol.
uBlock can fix all three of those things btw :) I sometimes forget how painfully slow it can be to browse without it - even with a fast fibre connection it takes sooo long just unbundling the referrer tree before it even starts to load anything!
The most anoying thing for me is infinite scrolling. It hardly ever works properly and even when it does it has a whole host of issues that just don't exist with seperate pages.
Ikr!!! I am utterly in LOVE with old web design because it had _character_ and it wasn't just generic and boring. I want to make websites like that-after all, if you're using something every day, why not use something that's not just boring and flat, but that's interesting and thoughtfully made?
12:54 "this program isn't VERY complicated..." you just made an early 2000s childhood simulator, you may as well be a necromancer at this point... a technomancer. this was an incredibly engaging video, it really took me back. back to when I was 7 years old and looking forward to going to the school library to use the computer with the internet in it. however, gaming was forbidden on those computers because they didn't want kids hogging the internet for flash games. 😂
You know, if I were to collect retro computers and you figured out how to give out the schematics/some kind of kit for this kind of thing, I would 100% use this to emulate old school internet on those computers, now we just need to figure out how to get Flash and other elements working to make it even more accurate
You could probably figure something out with flashpoint archives being added to the pi’s sd card, and some kind of script to check games against its archive
A lot of websites in the early 2000s that used Flash as the delivery method for content are unfortunately hard to keep accurate, as Flash was known to not be SEO friendly.
@@mwanikimwaniki6801 well it isn't really explanatory by itself so, a guide is still needed. too bad there isn't really a reliable guide either on the developer's github page or anywhere else
@@mwanikimwaniki6801 got experience with running tiny core linux? If so, you could use that and set up a small, (potentially less than 800mb), image to do it.
Congratulations, you watched the video then made a comment trying to convince people you haven't watched it yet and know exactly what's going to happen
could not help but laugh when you said “all the way back to 1996…” as i remember my first experience with the internet back in the mid 1970’s on an IBM 1130. great video, hope you do a tutorial on the build. got yourself a new subscriber
2002... I was in 2nd year of high school. using Intel Pentium 3, 800MbHz CPU with Windows 98, a slow dial up modem (broke immediately when there was a incoming call) and a Netscape browser... mostly i browsed Yahoo, searching for my homework, opened Napster, downloaded WinAmp skins and played some online games (flash games :D ). Thank you for bringing up some memories
This brings out so many memories! I agree, there was something special and more personal about the web back in the day. I guess people were not really used to it yet.
I'm 30 so most of my internet usage and memories was done in the early/mid 2000s, this video hit me like a wave of nostalgia so hard. I wish I had a PC old enough that would justify me hacking one of these together. I too miss people injecting the ugliest CSS and HTML into their own blogs for either pretty or hideous design and personal flare. Myspace was ripe with that sort of thing and there's just something endearing about it all.
I love this. It combines retro computing with the Internet Archive accessed through a Raspberry Pi inside a real nice looking and probably 3D printed shell that's easy to use as well. It's perfect.
Watching this video brought out all the memories in an instant. From the first time i would hang around with dial up modem internet on websites like cartoon network online flash games, then slowly by slowly moving on to RU-vid and the now the technology we have now. Brought a tear to my eye. Thank you for reminding how the journey of World Wide Web was in the early time and how it has progressed in the modern times.
i feel like you cater specifically to me with each new video i learnt how to do web design last week and immediately got that kind of opinions btw :-) i first logged on in 2010, but i do remember lots of the "old web" because most of the websites i browsed back then were still pretty oldschool (some were full of view counters and under construction gifs, and most were customized to infinity. forum culture thrived longer where i live, too)
Make sure you are spending as much time as you can helping other people and strengthening the kingdom of God while you are here on earth. This world is rapidly passing away. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life. If you have any questions about scripture feel free to ask me
A fact to consider is that web design has turned towards simplicity not solely out of a desire for aesthetic, but also in an effort to make the web more accessible. Look into the Web Accessibility Initiative. If you're not already familiar with it, you'll get some really great insight into why web design has changed in the ways it has. Great video! edit: I feel like I didn't touch on the content of the video, haha. What you created is actually amazing and would be an awesome interactive display in a museum. Like a real museum, not some obscure internet museum. Seriously great job on this!
When I saw the the title, at first I thought that this has been done multiple times. But when I saw you playing with the date dial and refreshing pages, you got me sold on this. It really gives a magical feel to an otherwise mundane Internet Archive proxy.
Make sure you are spending as much time as you can helping other people and strengthening the kingdom of God while you are here on earth. This world is rapidly passing away. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life. If you have any questions about scripture feel free to ask me
8:52 it actually does, but it uses the scripts that it adds to the response to replace the original, usually non-functional player with their own, which plays an archived version of the video, if archiving it succeeded maybe fixing it would be possible by having a list of URLs that have dynamically generated content and having them point to URLs that have the same functionality (either because they were moved, or to recreations because they got annihilated over the years)
Hoover Fusion Frenzy!! I literally found that after I’d seen a Hoover cyclone vacuum in the store and thought “couldn’t only Dyson make those?”, so I went to the website on the box and found the game there. God I played that so much. Another product placement game I have fond memories of is that Logitech bouncing flubber guy game. You have to bounce from key to key on a keyboard and the rest of the floor (I mean, keyboard) is lava. Plus there’s the Lego games like Junkbot (2 was my favourite) and, uhh, that hacking game with Lego Technic RC car. It rolled-up to the corporation’s air-gapped server and hacked-into it with a laser beam!! Wowsocool! That was the game that taught me haus is pronounced house not horse, because of the pharmaceutical company Pharmhaus in the story. Haha, that “slow loading” B-roll you showed was like when I’d first got to use ADSL. Dial-up was a lot slower than that! (But frequently-visited sites were about that speed in practice, albeit looking differently, since they’d be cached and only have to load-in a handful of new pieces.) And yeah, they certainly looked better at those resolutions. Much better than seeing all of it at once in a skinny column on the left. There’s a reason so many said “best viewed at 800x600/1024x768 in IE/Netscape”, after all! My favourite era has to be 2006-2010 though, when dynamic-scaling websites were a common thing, yet the design-language was still very 2000-2005.
oh heck, i actually did something kinda similar to this a few years ago! what i did was i downloaded a bunch of pages from the wayback machine (gotta love wget and some paitience!), and then hooked it up to a Fiddler session that would use the AutoRedirector feature to point web URLs to the downloaded copies stored locally on the target machine (a windows XP VM in my case), i never really released any of it but it was a really fun project to work on in my spare time
Woah, you should consider sharing this with museums!! This is super sweet. Seriously if you’re interested in doing that and want some help I’d be happy to participate in some way to facilitate the dissemination of this. This video blew my mind
In hindsight, this seems like such an obvious application of the Wayback Machine. Bravo! (Also, seeing BonziBuddy for the first time in two decades makes me realize how nostalgia is a hell of a drug).
I would like a followup video showing how the rotary encoder, and screen were connected. And how the encoder was made to work with the WaybackProxy. I really enjoyed the video, but there is a lot of work needed from anyone trying to duplicate this in rediscovering your setup and cabling. That makes the video exclusionary for the less technical viewers. It's clear that you have put a lot of love into this project and it works well. I hope that you can find the time to share more instruction and code so that others can enjoy it.
7:50 smoother? i'd say more bloated, filled with mobile-first designs even though i'm on a desktop with a 1080p screen, bland souless flat design, can't forget the tons of javascript and the necessity to spy on you everywhere you go. that's what web design has turned into, there's no personality anymore.
You should release a BOM for this along with any extra scripts or programs you've written to tie the hardware and the WaybackProxy together. Would love to build my own sometime
Very cool! I already support some similar projects, but this is a black magic box ;-) so cool to see other people like browsing the past on good old machines
Mid 2000s web design is my favorite, every websites was designed like a newspaper or collage and made full use of the screen real estate of the the time. It was so dense in info, easy to understand and navigate when done right.
This reminds me of my plan to restore a vintage radio and play period radio shows through an AM transmitter while telling visiting friends that my radio tunes in radio from the 30s. Lol
For some older machines, the older ones that don't have an ethernet port, you may need to use a serial - ethernet bridge module between your computer and the "Internet Time Machine". This can be tricky, though. There's option but they can be trick so you may need to do some research on this for finding the most compatible solution. Remember, you're basically connecting to internet from the old computer through RS-232 serial (like they did for usage with modems and in the old days, they may have hooked up to a local Internet Web server computer via a null modem cable and there is some solutions to make it possible to pass the web address commands through the serial bus. So there's ways to do this. In this case, you might have a more fancier computer handling this whole "internet time machine" stuff via software and just have to have some RS-232 card or RS-232 to USB interface (or it could be the cable that does that) and you then have that same end result. I like the hardware device idea although it can be done in software using your PC (windows or Linux) to do the "magic". We have done this trick with old Commodore 8-bit computers. Some of us used the lantronix UDS-10 devices that served as a bridge from RS-232 to Ethernet. You would most likely need to place the UDS-10 (or other similar devices) between the RS-232 port on the old computer to the "Internet Time Machine" and then from it onward to the router and internet itself.
Please be mindful that I am not explicitly saying you should use the UDS-10. There are other devices of similar nature or function that maybe more easier to work with but also some newer devices of similar nature may also have a lot of 'extra' stuff in the firmware that on one hand may seem to make it easier can actually make things more complicated.
I really liked this video, it reminded me of how lucky I was to grow up in a time before the internet, and then the awe of the discovery of online spaces, and finally the transition of how I view it today. As the means of my work, play, and everyday life. . Thanks, and great video, I might even look at making my own, except, I have NO desire to use it on anything other than a virtual machine, I don't miss that hardware.
This has some really interesting potential for digital archives of internet history. Archives of this kind are good at displaying the look of old webpages but often struggle to re-create the experience of browsing the internet in the past - as you say, the Wayback Machine is good but the fiddly interface and frequent broken images are barriers to full immersion. Something like this would allow archives to emulate the experience as well as the content of the historical Web, allowing people to access old webpages on retro computers using the software of the time. Really bringing internet history to life.
old 2000s web design was the best, nowadays minimalist huge image infinite scrolling trash is just a sign of decadence. The same happened to houses. Its just cultures in decline.
During the two pre-roll ads, I thought about how I would implement your device. I got the wayback machine for content right, but not your web proxy. That is genius.
It was cool because you felt like you were connected to something else that nobody else had. It was cool because it wasn't mainstream. But everyone else had fomo and then here we are where everything is boring in 2022 because of it. Being born in 90 the internet of the 90s and early 2000s to me is probably something I'm going to complain about when I'm older just like boomers complain about seat belts etc. At least I got to see it before they made it lame. I guess every great thing has to die and that's life
@@CalebRazzleberry I know that design trends and trends in general come and go then make an eventual return, but that would certainly be a dream. I long for the days of the internet being powered by the people and the common web page elements reflecting that. I hope RU-vid brings back customizable channel pages with the comment box that helped channels feel more like a community than just a place to go to recieve entertainment.
The internet now is just a tool of day to day life. Gone are the days of hanging out in OG chatrooms, one thing I do actually miss. As voice chat with anymore then a couple friends makes it almost impossible to have multiple conversations going at the same time.
11:59 that's mainly due to the fact that most sites today are dynamic - they're created when you load them because they rely on user-generated content. Such sites will always look rather boring because they have to be - they have to provide a uniform and predictable user experience or nobody will touch them. Personal sites, on the other hand, can still be super creative because many are either static or they're built it such a way as to maintain flexibility because the designer knows what he/she will put on it and they don't have to compensate for user content.
I suggest to use a "16×1" display insted in the time machine, because the second line is just wasted (empty). 😉 💡 Also, what if the scrollwheel is clickable and it can change "jump rate" between years and individual snapshots? 😉
I just realized, my website I made, does not use today's style, instead, I themed it on what the website was for. It still does look flat, but it's a lot more different from most other websites.
You could put a Flash Emulator integrated on the Rasp Pi to intercept most browser games and then run then as they are supposed to. Like, its not something so easy to do, but it may be a cool experiment. I think the hardest part is to fit those in old OS, as they have different requirements. I made an concept a time ago that basically extracted the .swf file link from the page content, downloaded it and run it on another window. You are making a system that modifies the page, maybe you can just fetch the swf file when the page starts, then proceed to load it on where it was supposed to be using a emulator or the actual FlashPlayer 32 File (its hard to find it today), it would run locally, but that's convenient. (I know the page itself has come from the archives, so it is not a local page, it has a URL and its hosted, but running flash locally is literally what it did back then and i don't think this would be impossible) A easier approach is to just put a browser extension, a flash emulator already made for browsers to run those games. It is supposed to load any SWF file on the site, but its not that nostalgic having a emulator logo before your game, or maybe its a problem because of the fact that you are using IExplorer.
