Nostalgia for the days of the early web has been gathering steam for a few years now, as part of the whole 90s-nostalgia package. And though Geocities and Angelfire are practically non-entities today, everyone who remembers the internet’s early days remembers the look of those pages: the night-sky backgrounds, the white or green text on black, the MIDI files, and of course the “under construction” GIFs.
Now Jason Scott, a historian at the Internet Archive, has compiled a page of all the “under construction” GIFs he could find. The result is a monolithic, blinking tribute to the time before UX.
Videos by VICE
As Scott tells The Atlantic, “it represents this utterly different philosophy that you need to know that this site is under construction, it’s not done yet. Now, we know all sites are not done. If your site is done, something is wrong. It’s bad. You’re either out of money or you’re boring.”
Part of this change is due to the fact that sites can hold much more data, and part is due to our evolving outlook on how dynamic the internet can be.
The Internet Archive is currently trying to save all the sites still left on Geocites, which is where Scott found all of these GIFs. If you want to help preserve a piece of digital history, visit Archive Team’s site to find out how you can help.
(h/t The Atlantic)
