The Internet As It Was in 2001 - Old Websites

hey friends now today we're going to take a trip back 20 years to the year 2001. as recently i was remembering this year and i'd forgotten just what an incredible year for technology 2001 was we've got new games consoles that year the very first xbox was released nintendo brought us the gamecube and the game boy advance we had the first ipod in 2001 brand new operating systems that are now legendary windows xp and the very first version of mac os 10 all arrived in 2001 so today we're going to jump in the delorean take a trip back 20 years and check out a few websites many of which are actually websites that we still use today and see how they looked back in 2001 and just before we jump into that i wanted to take a moment to give a big thank you to this video sponsor the amazing world of tanks now this is a free to play game with over 100 million players worldwide and available now for your pc and you can command over 550 tanks in more than 40 battle arenas and until the end of july world of tanks is holding an event in collaboration with g.i joe and you can get the gi joe breakthrough tank style and cobra battle operational assault tank style that are designed to look like the classic toys we had when we were kids and anyone who uses the invite code and completes the gi joe missions will receive free gi joe and cobra emblems to customize their tanks so give world of tanks a download right now by using the link in this video's description and if you use the invite code gi joe 21 that will activate in-game missions and you'll receive free gi emblems to decorate your tanks and also a t14 tank at tier 5 500k credits and seven days of a premium account so check out world of tanks this month and support my channel [Music] okay then ready to travel back in time now today's video is actually going to be a follow-up to a vid that i made a couple of summers ago where we used a service that had just been released at the time called the old net.com that lets you browse websites in a retro browser from a particular year but there have been some quite nice updates to the oldnet.com and also being that it is the 20th anniversary of 2001 i thought it might be quite a good idea to um have a little revisit of those websites today so to do this um obviously 2001 windows xp came out but not until right at the end of the year most people back then were still using windows 98 and second edition i was in 2001 but i thought for this video because actually this was the only version of windows 9x that i could get playing properly in virtualbox with a full display without having to scroll around we're going to be using windows millennium edition so uh what are the chances that that will be the most stable version in virtualbox so we're going to be using um windows me uh with netscape version six that is generally considered most people's least favorite version of netscape so what a combination windows me and netscape six but this was the version that got released in august of 2001 so you know it is era appropriate but to be honest it doesn't really matter which web browser we're using there is a more up-to-date browser available for windows 95 98 and windows me called retro zilla that will allow you to visit modern websites you know if that's more you think but on this obviously we're looking at sites from 20 years ago so uh netscape version 6 should work just fine although i am going to remove that horrible sidebar that takes up you know a big chunk of the browser so there we go so we're back on the website again the old net.com and by default that shows nintendo.com we can change it to uh google.com and then select the year that we want to visit now for this video we'll do 2001 click on go and uh i don't think the google home page has changed all that much in 20 years there you go apart from the uh the logo looking slightly different we can see there from the copyright date 2001 that it has served up the correct version and that's how we did it in the last video that i made just uh going back to this homepage and changing it but now they've actually introduced a proxy that you can use so we go here to the http browser proxy if you look in there what you can actually do is kind of trick your web browser into believing that it's actually still that year so rather than having to go to the oldnet.com all the time you can just type in like google.com and it will serve up any website that you go to that image using this service from the year 2001 and obviously the way that the oldnet.com works is by taking the web images from archive.org wayback machine which is probably one of the most ambitious projects in mankind they started back in 1996 with the aim of archiving every website in the world and so there's loads of great images to look back on over the last 25 years the only thing is archive.org kind of wrap it in a lot of javascript and stuff so it won't work in web browsers of the time which is why we need a service like the oldnet.com so if we look here we can actually set up a proxy for the oldnet.com and then in the port you put the year that you want to be stuck in as it were you need to do an exception for web.archive.org so it will serve stuff like images and media so using netscape 6 here i can go into the preferences and then we'll go into advanced and go to proxies and here we can do a manual proxy configuration so for http we'll do um the old net.com port we want to do 2001 and then we need to do no proxy for and they said yeah web dot archive dot org so that should all be set up correctly now for what we want to do we'll hit return and now we'll give it a test we'll just go to google.com and see if it serves up the old version and there we go google as it was in 2001 so really our web browser is now locked into the year 2001 and any websites that we go to it will just serve up a version from 20 years ago so let's check out a few sites and see how they looked two decades ago obviously nintendo.com that was the one that served up originally in the old net and um obviously a company that is very dear to our hearts of gamers and it was really exciting time for nintendo so let's have a look at what was going on on nintendo's homepage 20 years ago as now and the page took about a minute or so to load i mean in some ways we are also emulating the speed of the old net with these old browsers and everything but here it is nintendo.com as it would have appeared 20 years ago and you see the main news there is a super smash brothers melee about to come out by the looks of it new screenshots so it's kind of getting people hyped up for that game and let's have a look at the systems though obviously that was a big deal in 2001 the fact that we got you know two new consoles from nintendo the gamecube and the game boy advance and yeah i think the nintendo 64 was probably still on sale at that point as well as 2001 was a really really big crossover year for gaming playstation 2 would come out the year before the dreamcast was still on the market then and we had a lot of the old systems like you know the ps1 whistle on the market the n64 there were still games coming out for that so if you walked into your local game shop then there was a massive selection of different consoles that you could buy for and let's have a look here at the uh the specs of the gamecube that was brand new at the time that this website was made um and i will not make you know back then i wasn't really a big fan of the gamecube i mean i was more you know i looked at the ps2 and thought that looks like a an adult system i always thought the uh the gamecube looked a bit kiddy you know it's kind of bright colors and it's a little carry handle obviously since then i've got a hold of one today you know in the last 10 years or so big fan of it and there's a lot of power packed in that box you know it's a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing actually this so is the nintendo gamecube an audio visual machine or is it a game machine see this is something that today you know we kind of um rip xbox and uh playstation 4 a little bit the fact that they always want to try and cram this multimedia thing when we just want to play video games looks like nintendo were actually trying to cram that into the gamecube back in 2001. um the answer is to this question the nintendo gamecube focuses on gameplay so there you go that's what we all want isn't it just a machine that's going to do really good gameplay the n64 was a highly advanced piece of hardware however because it had such superior capabilities developers probably felt it was a challenge for them to produce for it um yeah it did have a reputation for being a difficult system on which to program so obviously we're aiming to make that a bit easier with the gamecube and some nice little pictures down here as well the controllers i did love the controller on the gamecube especially over the n64 that you know i know has its fans but it was always a bit of an acquired taste that obviously had those little mini cds as well that the um the gamecube used for its optical media but again i think did limit in some ways because you know there was only a certain amount of storage you could fit on there compared to like you know dvd that you got on a playstation 2 for example um yeah that is very cool let's go back and see what else is available check out the uh the game boy advance that is one of my favorite game boy models so yeah it kind of talks about the original game boy how it changed gamers lives in 1989 and we had the uh connect four game boy advanced systems together 50 bigger than the game boy color high resolution i love the fact that it was kind of widescreen as well you know you could put it on the side and felt a lot more comfortable like a proper controller in your hand three different colors extended battery life yeah i forgot they actually made the um the connection kit so you could use it as kind of like a screen on certain gamecube games couldn't you plug it into the front of the gamecube a huge library of more than 450 games so it looks like this um capture of the website was just before the game by advance was released as we're talking about you know a ton of new games are going to be launched with it but also it's got backwards compatibility with 450 game boy color and game boy games on there as well so uh yeah very cool to uh see what nintendo also the biggest gaming company on the planet both then and now we're up to back in 2001. yeah and still going big on nintendo 64 games in the gaming section of the website here with excitebike uh banjo-tooie there as well pokemon puzzle league so uh yeah great little snapshot into history and this year was a really exciting year for apple obviously i mentioned that the ipod landed in 2001 but also we had the new designed ibooks as well obviously steve jobs had returned to apple a couple of years earlier and we got the um the ones that everyone kind of affectionately calls the uh the toilet seat ibooks this was a version that i got i got an ibook g3 one of the um snow white ones with this design my first ever laptop that i owned i was a massive fan of that machine and as you can see here we've got a lot of that kind of uh early 2000s aesthetic on the apple website here so um starting at 1299 and you see the specs of it there as well with the uh cd cdr and dvd yeah the superdrive was built into here as well airport ready so it had wi-fi built in that was you know it was a big deal for 2001. someone if we can see a bit more detail about the ibook if we click on it now admittedly the ibook does look a bit of a unit compared to today's laptops i mean if you've got like a macbook air or one of the new macbook pros weighing in at 4.9 pounds a lot heavier than what we have today but at the time this was a real revolution you know to do university work and that kind of thing these machines were fantastic and having that built-in wi-fi too um and even the talking about itunes as well the um i think was itunes 2 that was available in 2001 just in time for the ipod to be released i'm talking about capturing digital footage from their dv camcorders as well it had firewire built in came with imovie 2 airport ready and also at the time they were bundling mac os 9 and os 10 on that duel boot on all of their max because os 10 and i think we click on the tab there at the top and find out a bit more about it when that first version was released os 10.0 cheetah i've done videos on it before but it was extremely unstable and loads of bugs out of the box and actually it got um slated in quite a few reviews just for being you know not quite ready for prime time so to kind of get around that apple was still bundling the older version mac os 9 with all of their max on dual boot so the uh you know the user could have a choice of which environment they lived in but yeah really cool to see now that old font as well and i did love the design that kind of um pin stripe design you know the early mac os 10. it was a really nice era for uh apple aesthetics i thought back then and i've switched over the web browser to retro zillow just to kind of give you a bit of a demo of that and actually the um the rendering of pages is quite a bit quicker using retro zilla than they're waiting around for netscape six but again you can see here another section of apple's homepage um talking about you know the new 600 megahertz ibook and all these various devices around it as well you know pdas cameras camcorders uh wi-fi there bunch of cds and a portable cd player all this stuff that we have in our pocket using you know mobile phone today 20 years ago you needed all this stuff you know hooked into your laptop to get that full multimedia experience and the section on the first ever ipod and that was the strap line that they were going big on when the ipod first came out 1 000 songs in your pocket as there were other mp3 players on the market i mean i remember having like a a diamond rio or rio diamond had like um 64 megs in there and the stuff like the creative players were on the market but the ipod having that five gigabyte hard disk in there and the fact that you could have a thousand songs on it and also had firewire as well that was a lot quicker than a usb 1 that was on the market at the time so it was a real revolution and you know for most people the ipod is what got them into um mp3 players you know kind of killed off the uh the portable cd player and as you can see there you know the original ipod with it's a physical scroll wheel i did a video on that on my channel a few years ago from check it out you can put your entire mp3 collection on there plug it into your ibook via firewire then sync it with your itunes library on the computer this was before apple was selling digital music as well and actually getting hold of legal mp3s was quite tricky back in 2001 when they kind of encouraged you to buy the cd and then rip it using itunes but obviously a lot of us were using um you know kazaar or napster a couple of years before and uh really piracy was the way that most people were getting songs onto these devices originally which was you know a big reason that apple wanted to get the digital music store and kind of convinced the music industry that it was a way to go because if people couldn't buy easily they'll go out and pirate it and we've checked out apple so i thought we'd have a look at the other big tech giant in that year obviously microsoft and they're about to launch windows xp now by the looks of this capture here it was um just before windows xp was launched be the first to experience it when it launches on the 25th of october and unfortunately it looks like they haven't actually saved the images on this page but we can look here at the uh the section of microsoft's website dedicated to the upcoming windows xp um nice little pond there great expectations read reviews about xp and check out the performance obviously it was really improved over windows 98 and designed for the power of the pentium 4 you know being nt based it was quite a big advancement compared to what most people had at the time and they even talk about the performance increases of windows xp here windows xp blasts past windows 98 sc starts faster launches apps faster creates content faster e-testings reports confirm that windows xp professional has a speed that you need so you can check out the overview and upgrade options as well yeah i think i got that the windows 98 se xp upgrade edition that was cheaper than buying the full version back then but you know very nostalgic to have a look back on microsoft's website on that really exciting time for them and while we're talking about microsoft this was one of the top 10 websites in the world back in 2001 microsoft's passport.com there was um like a single sign-in service for all of microsoft's different services and that you can even do payment with it as well nothing that you see on the web today but it does kind of still live on you know if you've got a an xbox account for example you can sign into your xbox one using your hotmail address you know microsoft still kind of have that technology in there but don't go that big on there you know the one that one password thing anymore but yeah this was everywhere back then even a kid's passport too and you could uh share your profile with other people nothing too exciting to look at but you know it might bring back memories as it was such a popular website back then and speaking of popular websites you know one that we still use today that actually the design of the logo and that hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years amazon.com and this is what you would have found when you went onto amazon's website back in summer 2001 and you can see the the big sellers then where obviously music cds were still a big deal a linksys router or router if you're in america um george foreman grill they were selling yes at this stage amazon had gone beyond just um selling books which is what they were originally obviously getting into electronics and uh kitchen and housewares and outdoor living and software even as well i'm not sure whether any of these links are gonna work anymore i'd be surprised if they did oh there we go okay i did actually it was this kind of the blue one with a little sticky up antennas at the back i did have one of these routers back in the day um yeah yeah that was a one yeah there was a wi-fi version with a little antennas at the back this was the earlier one though that was just ethernet but um what was the price for that 39.99 so not bad actually you know these were everywhere back then you know loads of people had the the linksys routers in their home back in the day you read the reviews as well about how easy it is to install so uh yeah nice snapshot of amazon as it was in its early days and another of the most popular websites in the world today actually debuted back in 2001 and that was wikipedia and as you can see here this is the very first wikipedia homepage it says there we started work in january 2001. so far we've got over 6 000 pages made and we want to make it over a hundred thousand which em they passed that goal a long time ago now but as you can see here very simplistic design um i'm not sure whether any of these links are gonna work let's try um having a look in there and there we go um yeah a lot more simplistic than the site is today and uh probably not you know with as many overzealous moderators as you get in uh in 2021 but yeah all that information is there if you want to check out the earliest days of wikipedia it looks like a lot of this is there still accessible obviously these really simplistic mostly text-only pages so it probably wasn't a big job to um archive these and uh they won't take up too much space on their servers so it looks like there's quite a lot of it here actually it's in the video game section oh wow yeah not too many in there at this stage but yeah nice a little look back on the the earliest days of wikipedia and if you wanted your tech culture and business news back in 2001 wired would be the place to go um i did love this um design of wired actually kind of reminded me a bit teletext you know with their uh their logo up here in the corner um talking about you know hula packard and cool town and ibm's research center to put the future on display talking about biotech as well um global treaty a threat to the net see that is one thing that's never gone away what's going to be the next big threat to the internet isn't it um court slaps fees on cd burners was that everything this is from june 2001 a german legal ruling demands hewlett-packard pay intellectual property fees on all the cd burners it's sold over the last three years was this like a a piracy thing then that was quite interesting i remember reading about that back in the day and obviously with this it kind of that's elsewhere on the net and it's kind of taking us off off site here um mp3 rocks the web you'll see that was a big buzz around mp3 players in this year with the uh the ipod landing and that's all doing file sharing back then the big labels the big record labels cry piracy but mp3 gains more credibility and converts every day so yeah and kind of a little snapshot of what was happening in the uh the tech news and the subjects that were hot 20 years ago by browsing through the wired archives on here and if we're talking about companies that we all knew back in 2001 nokia you know we didn't have iphones in our pockets then pretty much everybody i knew had a nokia or maybe a sony ericsson or a motorola they're popular too i was a big fan of nokia phones back then and as you can see here this is a nokia's corporate page from 20 years ago um didn't have one of those remember they were really cool though the nokia 92 90 a communicator this is kind of like a little pda really and you could do um even the web browser and stuff on it as well so very advanced for the time you remember it closed and you had the uh the keypad on the front there as well so you could hold it up to your face and make calls with it too the one i had though and i wonder if i can just um change the url here to nokia 3330 that was the one that i had there was the um yeah the internet connected version of the infamous nokia 3310 there it is i remember the day i got that phone and the interchangeable skins you could buy those off uh dodgy market stalls for a tenner so um yeah really good here what's this now this is a flash file here take the nokia 3330 for a spin in the interactive demo i've got a feeling they probably won't work anymore um not having flash in here oh here we go something's loading so something from nokia here looks obviously a star wars scroller okay skip intro wow right okay not exactly what i asked for um i thought we were gonna get a kind of a a 3d nokia 3330 to play with but yeah it seems to have taken me to a kind of side scrolling shoot em up game pretty cool lane i didn't know that was on there but yeah nokia what a brand back in the day you know obviously when smartphones came along they couldn't keep up but for a time nokia were king and i thought we'd jump onto playstation.com as it appeared 20 years ago obviously the playstation 2 was king back then so we'll click on north america see what we can get out of here i love the design of that as well um and here we go the playstation.com homepage from 20 years ago um i imagine singing the praises of the ps2 and as you can see some of the site hasn't loaded properly we do have some missing image placeholders here but you can kind of see the main content and layout of the website message boards they were quite a big thing for a time weren't they every website have like a message board where customers could talk to each other i think a lot of companies got rid of them as um a lot of customers would post complaints on these boards and you know it wasn't really the best advertising you could buy gift certificates there as well um we're kind of going big on cool borders 2001. let's have a look at hardware get the gear you need and deserve use the search function above or choose a product category to the left yes we've got all sorts here for the playstation 2. you need this yesterday now the ultimate weapon in the universe i did love the look of the ps2 that kind of you know black monolith look i thought it looked really cool still to this day one of the coolest looking consoles ever i think um and their featured products the playstation 2 remote controller kit that page didn't work unfortunately but yeah it did actually come with dvd um playback built in didn't it the um the ps2 not like the xbox what you needed a little dongle you had to buy the remote you know separately to even play dvds i thought was a big mistake by microsoft and i can't remember why that was now whether it was like a licensing thing or they was trying to get more money i'm not sure and this is quite interesting the the packs here 329.99 for the gran turismo 3 racing pack they actually say they limit one per customer or home so they're all kind of limited to you know one per household again i mean like today nothing's really changed in terms of um consoles when they first launched been really difficult to get hold of and you know the demand just kind of uh outweighing how quickly they can make the system so even back then they were limiting them to a one per customer and here we can see a few of the games that sony were featuring on their site for the ps2 max payne state of emergency nba 2k2 shadowhat's parappa the rapper two what a game uh then the charts i imagine that is there here tiger woods pga tour um harry potter and the sorcerer's stone gta 3 um dance dance revolution with dance pad yeah i mean come on still goes today that franchise doesn't it um virtual fighter 4 these are things that are coming out soon okay um nfl blitz 2002 star wars racer revenge i think i remember that one um yeah final fantasy um 10 obviously going big on that at this time too so yeah great to have a look back at um in the playstation 2 you know one of my all-time favorite consoles and uh nice little snapshot of the system at its peak here now whilst today we all use google for our search or uh bing nobody uses bing do they back then the search engine options were a little bit more varied um excite.com i remember that been a really popular one and actually i was watching a really good documentary um from a guy that i actually had in my podcast a couple of weeks ago um robert cringley who did a documentary back in 1998 called them web 201 kind of detailing the early years of the internet and actually he went behind the scenes with the guys from excite from their garage to when they got big corporate offices but around this time was when i think they made a bit of a mistake as a lot of these search sites did and let google come in and just take over because if you look here obviously you've got the search bit in the middle of the site where i can search for websites which is really the bit that we all wanted but then they've put all this crap around it so you know they're trying to give you news here they're trying to show you uh stock prices and they're trying to give you your horoscopes there as well and there's a new section and offers there as well and shopping and flights that you can book so a lot of these websites at the time thought that instead of giving just straight up search they had to become like almost these portals and give you everything that you'd want to find on the web all in one place i mean you probably did want the free bikini screensaver that it offers there but really that's why you know google came in with it's really simplistic homepage he got a lot of box search for your websites and he did a great job and really you know the simple ideas are often the best that's why they came in and they're sites like excite are no longer used unfortunately and even though the formatting is all messed up here um yahoo again still one of the most popular sites in the world back in 2001. this was more i mean at this stage they may have changed it a little bit but i remember when yahoo first started rather than being a you know search engine as such it was more a hand curated list of sites that they thought were worth promoting really so um i remember yahoo i think was probably the first website i ever went on back in the day you can see some of their news there as well they were again going down the portal kind of route um but by this stage that actually bought um geocities as well i remember um yeah here we go yeah it was rebranded as yahoo cities by this stage um and i wonder how much you've got then so if you wanted to make a free page on geocities i've got a feeling it's only something like 15 megabytes yeah so i mean considering you're only storing like a a bunch of anime gifs and um html wasn't bad actually for free and then they started giving you stuff like yeah they're a wizzy wig like page builder i remember by this stage as well and you could ftp into your site so it's a little bit more um fully featured than it was when it was a straight upgrade cities back in the 90s and uh i'd loaded websites that i was still running on there at this stage in 2001. and here is the bbc's homepage that was captured on sunday the 24th of june 2001 and just about to start wimbledon 2001 kind of giving you a little guide to what's going on master chef but if you're outside the uk um a daytime cooking show that was on tv and how to get involved in that too um the weather forecast for the day 24 degrees in london yeah not too bad a bit cooler than uh than it has been here recently and i'd forgotten that the bbc did this they're kind of best of the web again it looks a bit like yahoo you know kind of the bbc's hand curated list of websites they they thought you might find interesting um yeah very similar to yahoo actually i'm surprised yeah who didn't get pissy over that actually and we can check out cnn.com um larry king up there in the corner this capture from june 22 2001 and the u.s reacts to heightened terror threat and obviously this was only a couple of months before 9 11 as well i'm already talking about bin laden there too so um yeah i mean looking at these old news archives kind of knowing what's coming sometimes can feel a little bit weird but here is cnn's homepage as it was in summer 2001 and just finally before we round up this video i thought i'd show you the uh the site that was really the home page for many people when they first went online aol.com aol anywhere so if you were an america online customer back then this page might look very familiar and i do remember all those aol cds even here in the uk you know by this stage we're getting loads of them through our door um i did i did go with aol for a while actually when they had free trials um even though we had um ntl um cable i think we got in 2001 eventually and i think something like a five megabytes but having an awesome connection was pretty cool uh so yeah really interesting to look back on this um i imagine probably most of this won't work anymore you know you look at aol instant messenger um all the chat rooms and groups that they had back then which i do remember these sites were very um javascript heavy weren't they so here as you can see it hasn't loaded uh but nice to have a little look back at the uh the home page i'm sure that will be very nostalgic for some so there you go a little trip back in time 20 years checking out the web as it was in 2001. if you want to experiment yourself with the oldnet.com and that little guide on how to get that running on your old machines i'll put all that in the video description thank you so much for watching this vid and i'll see you in the next one and just a quick reminder that i do a weekly retro gaming and technology podcast with new episodes released every friday and we bring you veterans legends from the video game and technology industry as guests on the show each week and you can get it from your favorite podcast client or head to our website the retrohour.com or you can ask your smart speaker to play the retro hour podcast and while you're here on youtube here are another couple of my videos i think you might enjoy thanks for watching you

Channel: Dan Wood

Views: 82,269

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Id: F6O8-xjOCgc

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021