I Made an Internet Time Machine

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 retro computing 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 wi-fi 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 plus years ago but most of these that remain are personal pages or promotions for weird art house films commenting on the stillness 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 altogether is the wayback machine maintained by the internet archive it's a fully browsable collection of websites spinning all the way back to 1996 there is a web interface but since that kind of ruins the 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 going to set up a wi-fi 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 going to do this though we'll need to talk a minute 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 of 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 for the first one and skip downloading from the web server twice proxies can also change 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 the request 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 i figured that 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 richard g 867's wayback proxy first off it was written in python say what you will about the language but it sure is in javascript more importantly though mr g here added some sweet quality of life features like support for the oocities archive of chio cities 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 visible 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 googlable rules using ip tables to pass along any traffic from the ethernet port onto the wi-fi connection at this point it's now possible to connect something like my imac here up to the wayback machine and get a web page 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 would be hard to do but a plug-and-play device would be even simpler and feel all the more auto-magic what i'd really like is for the raspberry pi to identify any http requests coming in through the ethernet port and forward them to the proxy instead of passing them to the wi-fi 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 that 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 came to life i added a display in a 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 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 are 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 add-ons 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 homepage and did you know that there used to be a list on the site of public servers to play on back in 2009 there were a few servers but check back one year later and now there's too many to fit on the screen the fact that i can just jump around to different dates with the spin of a 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 kind of 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 kind of 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 10 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 though or the old imac in between faux 3d icons and chunky toolbars 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 eight-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 during the loading process when it comes to flash or java 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 bloons tower defense no suite life of zack and cody pizza party pickup no dyson telescope game no hoover fusion frenzy did anyone realize how many vacuum themed flash games there are seriously who is 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'd kind of 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 stripy 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 at 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 photo infinite scrolling websites 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 finite battery life but man does it just leech out the personality from web design i think to some extent this design change just kind of 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 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 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 before i completely fall for that 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 wherever i want and even though most content is found on just a few sites finding content that you actually want to watch on these sites is so much easier than it used to be actually i used to think old web design was kind of ugly but after building this little internet time machine i realized all 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 going to test out how well this thing works on websites from the future [Music] you

Channel: The Science Elf

Views: 620,032

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Id: 0OB1g8CUdbA

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022