This is the internet time machine.
It’s a box with an ethernet cord coming out the side.
All you have to do is plug it into a computer, spin the dial, and connect to the internet
as it was on whatever date you set.
Actual results may vary, batteries not included.
Why do this?
Well, when it comes to retrocomputing, for me anyways, I love to experience machines
how they were originally used day to day, as opposed to just retro gaming.
One of the things you’ll note when collecting machines from the late 90s and early 2000s,
is that most of the work people did on them was getting online.
After all, back then, the internet was one of the primary drivers of computer sales.
Everyone wanted in on it, from AOL users, to kids, to Moms on the Net!
“I tapped into, the POWER” Unfortunately, getting older computers online
nowadays isn’t the easiest task.
For one, most of them don’t have Wifi hardware built in, meaning that you’ll need to have
a wired connection available.
Past that though, a lot of modern websites don’t support older browsers, either refusing
the requests altogether, or returning a web page far too complicated for something like
90s Internet Explorer to navigate.
When it comes to the first problem, there do exist Wifi to Ethernet bridges that can
get these older computers onto a more modern network.
As for the second, well, what better for an old computer than old websites?
There do exist some sites from the 90s that are still hosted exactly how they were 20+
years ago, but most of these that remain are personal pages, or promotions for weird arthouse
films commenting on the staleness with which large studios capitalize on youth culture.
One great place to find old websites though, and honestly one of my favorite places on
the web, is the Wayback machine maintained by the Internet Archive.
It’s a fully browsable collection of websites spanning all the way back to 1996.
There is a web interface, but since that kinda ruins immersion and introduces compatibility
limitations, I thought it would be best if I could just browse the internet like normal
on the old computer, and invisibly connect to the wayback machine.
So, here’s the plan.
I’m gonna set up a wifi to ethernet bridge using a raspberry pi, and then grab any HTTP
requests that come in on the ethernet port.
Instead of passing them along to the internet, I’ll send them over to the wayback machine
to get an older version of the site, and then return that to the requesting computer.
To explain how I’m gonna do this though, we’ll need to take a minute to talk about
HTTP.
In a lot of ways, the web is just a file system.
When you load a web page, the browser sends a GET request to the server, and if the page
exists, the server replies with the HTML file for that page.
It’s the same idea for images, audio files, or whatever else might be embedded on the
web.
A web proxy is a server that sits in between the client and the host server.
When the client sends a request, it sends it to the proxy, and then the proxy passes
along the request to the web server.
And this ends up being a pretty nifty tool with a ton of applications.
If multiple people send requests through the same proxy, anyone on the outside can’t
tell which client made which request.
And even with just one client, proxies can make decisions on what requests get forwarded.
So if you load a file twice, the proxy could identify the duplicate request, remember the
response to the first one, and skip downloading from the web server twice.
Proxies can also change the requests that go through them, and that’s the functionality
I want to use here.
When the browser makes a request, I want the proxy to grab it, and replace it with a request
to the Wayback machine instead.
Requests to the wayback machine include the date and original URL, so it’s pretty easy
to take one web request and convert it into a Wayback request.
So easy, that I figured this was something I could hack together myself.
Now, I for one love writing my own software just for the learning experience, but sometimes,
it’s worth seeing if someone else has done it first, and this time, that check definitely
paid off.
With just a quick Google search, I found multiple proxies for the Wayback Machine available
to download and try out from Github.
I tested a few out, and the best by far was richardg867’s WaybackProxy.
First off, it was written in python, say what you will about the language, but it sure isn’t
Javascript.
More importantly though, Mr G here added some sweet quality of life features, like support
for the oocities archive of geocities, and an expanded date tolerance, which fixes most
of the missing images you normally see on a Wayback archive of a page.
It also includes a configuration page visitable in your browser, which means changing settings
like the date can be done without needing to restart the server.
I really can’t recommend this proxy enough.
I find it way smoother than the Wayback Machine web interface, and it usually gives better
looking results.
I’ll link the repository in the description, and I’d encourage everyone to download it
and give this thing a try.
With the proxy stuff mostly sorted, the next step was working out how to bridge the ethernet
on the old computers onto my WiFi using the raspberry pi.
Thankfully in my case, this is well documented and pretty easy to pull off.
All it takes is adding a few easily googleable rules using iptables to pass along any traffic
from the ethernet port onto the wifi connection.
At this point, it’s now possible to connect something like my iMac here up to the Wayback
Machine and get a webpage back, though to pull this off, you need to go into the browser
settings and manually configure it to connect to the proxy being hosted on the Pi.
It’s not like this setup is hard to do, but a plug and play device would be even simpler,
and feel all the more automagic.
What I’d really like is for the raspberry pi to identify any HTTP requests coming in
through the ethernet port, and to forward them to the proxy, instead of passing them
to the Wifi.
Then the proxy can connect to the internet, get the old version of the page, and feed
it back to the connected computer, which will think this is the real page.
This idea sounded simple enough, though I’ll have to level with you guys, I don’t do
much networking stuff on my day to day, so figuring out how exactly to configure this
was a bit of a pain.
Eventually, after working out the right keywords which turned out to be “masquerade transparent
proxy”, I did find a tutorial for exactly what I was trying to do, and finally, the
internet time machine was alive!
I added a display and rotary encoder dial for a physical date selection interface, and
then, to finish the whole thing off I put it in a beautiful enclosure made of only the
finest ABS plastic.
So, here it is, the internet time machine.
Using it is as simple as plugging it into the computer, setting the date, and launching
the web browser.
So far it seems to work on just about every computer I’ve tested.
The iMac, my XP machines, my laptop.
Just about the only thing it didn’t work on was this Mac Performa, which doesn’t
have an ethernet port.
Anyways, let’s get surfing.
I gotta admit, this thing makes browsing the web on retro hardware so much fun.
You can just pick a website that exists today, and just jump back a couple years at a time
to see what it used to look like.
Apple’s website is a really good example.
I can go back to 1999, step forward a year at a time, and see all the big product announcements.
Remember those slick color iMacs, those were pretty cool.
Or check this out, you can look at the Windows XP webpage from the day it was released, and
then go forward in time.
Addons get released, service packs get put out, and eventually, Microsoft starts asking
you not to use XP anymore.
A story over 13 years, able to be told in less than a minute.
There are even some wholesome stories to be seen on here.
I tried going back to one of the older iterations of the minecraft.net home page, and did you
know there used to be a list on the site of public servers to play on?
Back in 2009, there were a few servers.
Check back one year later, and now there are too many to fit on the screen!
The fact that I can just jump around to different dates with just a spin of the dial really
makes this thing feel like time travel.
Here’s the early Youtube homepage.
Not only can you see what the interface looked like, but you can see what were the big videos
of the day.
I kinda forgot just how much customization the channel pages used to have, with all their
fancy backgrounds and color schemes.
Also, did you know there was a Youtube Mobile site as far back as 2007?
That sounds absolutely painful and also, kinda neat.
Obviously you can still try all of this at home with a modern computer, no internet time
machine needed, but the real purpose of this device is to emulate the experience of going
online in the early 2000s, right down to using the original hardware itself.
In the past ten years, web design has gotten smoother, web browsers have gotten cleaner,
and screen resolutions have gotten bigger.
In fact a lot of these old sites get butchered by modern browsers, either appearing as a
misaligned mess, or if the web designer was a bit more careful back in the day, as an
empty void, with a little bit of content on the side.
On the XP tablet or the old iMac though, in between faux 3D icons and chunky toolbars
and without a browser tab in sight, the web pages feel right at home.
The fact that the original web wasn’t nearly as interactive as today certainly helps to
hide the limitations of this device.
After all, the wayback machine is a read-only archive, the original servers hosting these
web applications are long gone.
So sadly I can’t go back in time and buy this t-shirt, or vote on this really weird
MSN kids poll for 8 year olds.
Then again, most of the web back then was just whatever you downloaded to your computer,
so browsing petrified versions of these websites doesn’t feel too different from the real
thing.
Browsing the archived web does break a few other things though.
Namely, sites like the YouTube player don’t work properly since the internet archive doesn’t
store or stream YouTube videos.
Most games I’ve found span various types of not working, from failing to start, to
starting with errors, to breaking at the loading screen.
When it comes to Flash or Java content, not much beyond the simplest of interactive content
seems to work well from the Internet Archive, most likely due to assets the web crawler
forgot to grab.
So no Bloonz Tower Defense, no Suite Life of Zach and Cody: Pizza Party Pickup, no Dyson
telescope game, no Hoover Fusion Frenzy…
Did anyone ever realize how many vacuum themed Flash games there are?
Seriously, who was going to vacuum websites for games?
Anyways, thankfully, most popular Flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint, so
there are still options to play them.
After all the retro web browsing I’ve done, I gotta say, there’s something really charming
about 2000s web aesthetics that I had kinda forgotten.
I mean, everyone talks about the colorful, gaudy web of the 90s, but in my opinion, it’s
the next few years after that where things got interesting.
Websites did away with all the neon colors and tiled backgrounds, and went for something
a bit more reserved, but a bit more skeuomorphic.
Suddenly we got stripey wallpaper backgrounds, hover effects for buttons, every page had
a navigation bar.
We got cool divider boxes instead of everything floating in a white void.
And don’t even get me started on all the gradients.
It’s kind of ironic how in the early 90s, websites were pretty plain, mostly because
web standards of the time were pretty basic, and browser compatibility with these standards
was even worse.
Then, around the year 2000, new web technologies become more commonplace.
CSS support gets better, you start seeing more flash content, Java applets, fancier
graphics.
Everything gets really creative and lively, and then about a decade later, computers get
even more powerful and the white void makes its return.
Things start getting smoother and more minimalist, until we get to the giant photos, infinite
scrolling sites of today.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like flat design.
It’s readable, it doesn’t clash with user submitted content, and it can be a lot more
power efficient for mobile devices with a finite battery life.
But man does it just leech out the personality from web design.
I think to some extent, this design change just kinda symbolizes how people viewed the
web at the time.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, the web was exciting, and going online felt like an event,
like you were actually going somewhere.
This was before mobile internet was commonplace, so I personally recall times I would be excited
to get back home from the real world, so I could hang out in the digital world, as nerdy
as that may sound.
Everything felt a bit more personal too.
Most companies had a website, but you could still find plenty of sites being maintained
just by one person.
Not to mention all the small communities and forums.
The way I see it, a lot of the design from this time was just people trying to add their
own personal flair to their web presence.
Nowadays, the internet is just a fact of life.
Going online doesn’t feel that thrilling when we’re all already on it 24/7.
And the design of our sites and apps now reflect that.
Everything kinda looks the same, utilitarian, the web design never really gets in the way,
and it plays well with just about whatever you put in the template.
Plus, someone thought we just really needed those god awful infinite-scroller websites
with pictures that fill the whole screen.
YUCK!
Before I completely fall for the “everything was better when I was growing up trope”
though, I should say, the modern internet is still WAY better than the early 2000s web.
For one thing, the old internet was pretty slow, which as it turns out, this thing is
pretty good at simulating.
Besides that though, now I can get online whenever I want, and even though most content
is now found on just a few sites, finding content you actually want to watch on these
sites is so much easier.
Actually, I used to think old web design was kinda ugly, but after building this little
internet time machine, I’ve realized, all of these old sites look so much better in
low resolution through the warm glow of an old CRT.
This little device reminded me for the first time in a while, just how cool the internet
felt back when it was new.
Compared to some of my other projects, the Internet Time Machine is not very complicated.
It’s just a few programs written by other people that I hot-glued together in a cute
little box with a dial on top.
But in a way, it’s also one of my favorites.
It’s just too easy to get lost browsing the retro web on retro hardware, and remembering
what it was like when the internet was a bit rougher around the edges, but also, a lot
more human.
Anyways, that’s it, the Internet Time Machine.
Check out the wayback machine proxy that powers this thing in the description, something something
subscribe, and if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna test out how well this thing works on
websites from the future!