The internet has become such a vital part of our every day lives that we often forget it really hasn’t been around all that long.  In fact, the world wide web is still technically a teenager, as it wasn’t until August 1991 that CERN publicized the project, and the first true web browser (Mosaic) wasn’t released until 1993.  And just like any teenager, the internet needs someone to show off embarrassing pictures of its youth every once in awhile.

So in the midst of our studio renovations we ran across an old book that is equivalent to the baby-in-a-bathtub pictures parents like to show, and proceeded to spend a couple of hours laughing at how much the internet has changed.  What was this book…?  The World Wide Web Top 1000 of course, which catalogs the “top 5% of all web sites” according to its cover.  Published in 1996 during the internet’s infancy, it has preserved not only the humble beginnings of now-giant websites (for example we ran across “The Monster Board” which we all now know as monster.com), but also some of the most odd and inane sites we’ve ever seen.  “Aunt Agatha’s Occult Emporium” and “Thomas Clark King’s CyberNursery” and the like make for some humorous additions.

Nostalgia aside, it’s interesting to see how far the internet has come and in such a short amount of time.  Case in point… according to this book’s math (1000 sites being 5% of all sites), there were only around 20,000 web sites back when the book was published.  A quick search today reveals that there are over 231.5 million web sites on the internet or 13.71 billion individual pages.  Oh internet, how you’ve grown.

If you’re in the mood to take a trip down memory lane with us, you can buy the book from Amazon for the low, low price of $0.52.