About The Old Web

The Old Web is a community scrapbook for people who remember when putting something online felt slightly illegal, server space was measured carefully, and viewing somebody else’s source code counted as professional development.

It collects short, true stories about early websites, coding, hosting, search engines, affiliate marketing, forums, hardware, dot-com adventures and spectacular technical disasters. The goal is not to pretend everything was better. Most of it was slower, uglier and held together with alarming confidence.

What it did have was a wonderful amount of experimentation. People wrote their own playbooks because nobody had printed one yet. This site is for preserving those little memories before they disappear into old hard drives and increasingly unreliable brains.

Built the way it should be

The site runs on plain PHP, SQLite, server-rendered HTML, CSS and a small amount of JavaScript. No framework, build pipeline, blockchain, Flash plugin or browser toolbar is required.