Listicle: 10 websites that only Grandpa will remember

In 1993, an MTV VJ established an unofficial site for the channel for fans to access show schedules and discuss music updates. Two years in, the company decided that a website was actually a smart move, and took over the domain name. The internet was new, the world was opening up, and fans could suddenly access special interviews with acts such as Nirvana, The Rolling Stones, and Jay-Z on their computers. What a time to be alive!

This 1996 website still retains the low-key visuals and graphics reminiscent of the basic HTML websites we’d code in IT class in school. The creator listed fun facts about the spoon-and-fork combo tool, as well as links to a downloadable video of himself trying to eat ramen with it. You can still see the timestamp when it was last updated: 10 September 1996. Legit vintage.

The world’s oldest webcam has been running for 31 years. In 1994, two students at San Francisco State University set up the live camera to record everyday campus life (Aww!) and the weather. The camera itself has been shifted around campus several times since, but the feed hasn’t stopped. In 2019, there were attempts to shut it down, but the news made everyone so upset that the uni relented. It’s like a primitive ancestor of the city portals initiative that went viral last year.

Before Google. Before Facebook. Geeks surfing the information superhighway (Yes. They called it that!) in the late ’90s could enter chat rooms with strangers, discuss their pop-culture crushes and leave anonymous hot-takes on politics, news events, and even their own family drama. The site’s layout reminds us of the days of low-rise jeans (the OG version) and messaging @HotGuy1977 (the chat-handle version).

When Jawed Karim, co-founder of YouTube, decided to post a video testing the platform in 2005, little did he know it’d become a part of internet history. The video is 19 seconds long, grainy, and features Karim reviewing an elephant at the San Diego Zoo. The summary: Elephants are cool. The first Insta post, on the other hand, is a picture of a harbour in California, posted by Insta’s co-founder Kevin Systrom. Much less fun.

Move over, Talking Tom and Nitendogs. Neopets is every Millennial’s core memory. The OG virtual pet game is like a mashup of the Pokemon and Barbie universe, allowing you to raise cute, magical animals in Neopia, a fantasy planet. It’s spawned fanfiction and spin-off games. The competition for collectibles in the Neoverse has been so intense, there even was a black market for selling points and resources.

An American programmer started it in 1999 to keep his friends updated about his daily life (Could he be one of the OG influencers?) In its heyday, the most popular journals were about celebrity gossip, like a blog-based version of Reddit. Now, users post emo stuff, poems, stories from their lives, like it’s one giant communal diary. It’s like X, minus the arguments and political slugfests.

Guess when the world’s oldest trivia website was launched? 1995! The 30-year-old site has crowdsourced over 2.5 million questions from users. There are quizzes about stars – the astronomical and the celeb kind – movies, countries, and history. And you can sign up and create your own quizzes too. Buzzfeed, who?

Gen Z and Millennials may disagree on emojis, memes, and whether or not to use full stops while texting, but everyone’s grown up obsessing over fanfic featuring ourselves as the main character, and shipping Twilight’s Bella with Jacob. Admit it, you discovered smut for the first time on Fanfiction.net, which has been around since 1998. It’s a rite of passage. We listen and we don’t judge.

This 2001 site was where the ancestors of today’s memes were born. Its full name is You’re the Man Now, Dog, inspired by a line from the 2000 movie Finding Forrester. Users would post images and text with looping sounds, like a beta version of a GIF. It was brainrot before brainrot became a thing.