Recovering Lost GeoCities: A Methodology
How our crawler team navigated dead DNS records and cached mirrors to reconstruct over 12,000 abandoned personal homepages from 1998.
Inside the minds preserving digital history. Stories, research, and the ethos behind saving the early web.
We believe digital history belongs to everyone. Our archive is open-access, unfiltered, and designed to outlive the platforms that created it.
We don't just save URLs. We reconstruct contexts, recover lost media, and document the socio-technical evolution of the early internet.
Built by archivists, researchers, and retro-web enthusiasts. Our team thrives on collaboration, transparency, and shared curiosity.
We blend cutting-edge preservation tech with authentic 90s aesthetics. Function meets nostalgia in everything we build.
How our crawler team navigated dead DNS records and cached mirrors to reconstruct over 12,000 abandoned personal homepages from 1998.
Modern browsers strip away the raw HTML of the 90s. Here's why we maintain a custom rendering engine that honors table layouts and inline styles.
An inside look at the volunteers who manually verify and tag archived pages during our quarterly preservation drives.
How community navigation networks shaped early web culture, and why we're preserving every active and dead ring we can find.
Our infrastructure update: migrating to distributed cold storage while maintaining sub-second retrieval for researchers.
From spinning skulls to starry backgrounds: preserving the lost art of early web animation without modern compression artifacts.