there is something wonderfully y2k about this Yahoo! branded rubiks cube i found in a thrift store years ago

like a pure expression of the unbridled hope for the millennium and shareholders’ dreams encased in plastic

in february 2000, Be announced it was releasing its BeOS operating system for free.

here is the website around the free launch. i sure do miss that swoopy web design aesthetic with handcrafted nav icons and lighting effects.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815093906/http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/beosspecs.html

i've noticed in recent years that the laudable return to personal homepages has generally brought with it a very specific re-imagining of 1990s web design - usually lo-fi 1994 html-only and neon cyberpunkish affairs with loud animated gifs.

lost in that specific imaginary are 1996-1997 corporate designs that brought a slightly more conservative aesthetic that nonetheless remained playful.

if you played Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb, Dinotopia, or Faery Tale Adventure 2 you would remember The Dreamers Guild. this is their corporate site still live and maintained by joe pearce and brad schenck.

https://inherittheearth.net/dgi/indexnf.htm

thanks to @MossRC’s exceptional book Shareware Heroes, TIL that TUCOWS stood for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.

one of the best parts of irc in the 1990s was that it exposed your ip/domain when joining a channel, so everyone could see where you hailed from. i loved looking up the ISPs of the folks who joined, often finding uniquely weird local ISPs

if you were in BC, Quebec or Ontario in the 1990s on 56k dialup, it's very likely that you'd join with a .sympatico.ca FQDN

this is Sympatico's home page in 1998, in english (february) and française (july)

only a year later, sans serif fonts would replace times new roman and courier, animated gifs would be removed, and corporate web sites like these would begin to take on a stale design stormcrowing the sterile web aesthetic of today

https://web.archive.org/web/19980704132623/http://www2.sympatico.ca/accueil

https://web.archive.org/web/19980213121627/http://www1.sympatico.ca/

buried in my 30 year old copy of NSCA Mosaic alpha was a bookmarked hyperlink to a university of cambridge (uk) live webcam of a coffee pot, brewing in the Trojan Room computing lab

while live coffee/lab cams were not uncommon in the mid 90s, this one is fascinating for a few reasons:

- it was up and running in 1991, predating the graphical world wide web by a few years
- it ran over the MSNL protocol using a telecom network standard called ATM, which was a competitor to ethernet
- an entire machine was dedicated to grabbing a frame from the camera, compressing it, and uploading to the web server: an Acorn Archimedes
- the exact URL stored in Mosaic still resolves today, and the web page hasn't changed in 30 years

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

more history of the setup here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.html

more images of the sacred pot by @quentinsf here:
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/07/11/12127/

thanks to a frame grab from doug block's Home Page documentary, i was able to dredge up this ultra-90s web site that is completely undocumented on the web

it appears that Apple once built/hosted a Mission Impossible promo site for the film for its 1996 release. it appears to be some kind of hypertext adventure game.

sadly, WBM didn't archive anything past the splash page. but at least the frame grab from the movie shows the login page

https://web.archive.org/web/19961111063127/http://mission.apple.com/

a perfect web page, circa 1997: Sunny's Ultima Webpage

still live on his university webspace after 27 years
http://www.fim.uni-linz.ac.at/staff/sonntag/ultima.htm