I Made an Internet Time Machine

This is the

time

machine

of the Internet. It's a box with an Ethernet cable coming out the side. All you have to do is connect it to a computer. Turn the dial and connect to the Internet just as it was on the date you set. Actual results may vary. The batteries do not. included why do this right when it comes to retro computing for me anyway i love experiencing the

machine

s how they were originally used day to day rather than just retro gaming one of the things you will notice when collecting machines from the late 90's and The early 2000s is that most of the work people did in them was connecting to the Internet, after all, back then, the Internet was one of the main drivers of computer sales.

Everyone wanted to participate, from Aol users to kids and moms online. Unfortunately, I took advantage of the power. Connecting older computers these days is not the easiest task, as most of them do not have built-in Wi-Fi hardware, meaning you will need to have a wired connection available, although many modern websites do not support older browsers. . either rejecting requests outright or returning a web page too complicated for something like 90's Internet Explorer to navigate. When it comes to the first issue, there are Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridges that can connect these older computers to a most modern network. the second, well, what better for an old computer than old websites?

There are a few sites from the '90s that are still hosted exactly as they were over 20 years ago, but most of those that remain are personal pages or promotions for strange art films. The stillness with which big studios capitalize on youth culture is a great place to find old websites, and honestly, one of my favorite places on the web is the wayback machine maintained by the Internet Archive. It is a fully navigable collection of websites that goes back into the past. Until 1996 there is a web interface, but since that ruins the immersion and introduces compatibility limitations, I thought it would be better if I could browse the Internet as usual on the old computer and connect invisibly 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 take any http requests that come to the Ethernet port instead of passing them to the Internet. I'll send them to the Wayback machine to get an older version of the site and then send it back to the requesting computer to explain how I'm going to do this, although we'll need to talk for a minute about http in many ways the web is just a file system when loaded On a web page, the browser sends a get request to the server and if the page exists, the server responds with the HTML file for that page.

It's the same idea for images, audio files, or anything else that might be embedded on the web. A web proxy is a server. which sits between the client and the host server, when the client sends a request it sends it to the proxy and then the proxy passes the request to the web server and this ends up being a pretty nifty tool with a lot of applications if multiple. people send requests through the same proxy, anyone on the outside can't know which client

made

which request and even with a single client, proxies can make decisions about which requests are forwarded, so if you upload a file twice, the proxy could identify the duplicate request, remember. the answer for the first one and skip downloading from the web server twice.

Proxies can also change the requests that pass through them and that is the functionality I want to use here when the browser makes a request. I want the proxy to take it and replace it with the Wayback machine request instead. Requests to the Wayback machine include the date and the original URL, so it's pretty easy to take a web request and turn it into a Wayback request. So easy that I thought this was something I could hack myself now, for the love of it. I wrote my own software just for the learning experience, but some

time

s it pays to see if someone else has done it first and this time that check was definitely worth it with just a quick Google search.

I found several proxies for Wayback Machine available to download and try. github I tried a few and the best by far was Richard G's wayback proxy 867. First, it was written in Python, say what you want about the language, but it sure is in JavaScript, most importantly, although Mr. G here added some interesting quality of life features. such as support for the chio cities oocities file and an expanded date tolerance that fixes most of the missing images you normally see in a page wayback file. It also includes a settings page visible in your browser, which means changing settings like the date. done without needing to restart the server.

I really can't recommend this proxy enough. I find it much smoother than the Wayback Machine web interface and generally delivers better results. I will link the repository in the description and would encourage everyone to do so. download it and try this with the proxy stuff mostly sorted. The next step was to figure out how to connect Ethernet on the old computers to my wifi using the Raspberry Pi. Fortunately, in my case, this is well documented and fairly easy to achieve. All it takes is adding some easy-to-Google rules using IP tables to pass any traffic from the Ethernet port to the Wi-Fi connection.

At this point it is now possible to connect something like my imac here to the Wayback machine and get a web connection. However, to achieve this, return to the page, you need to go into the browser settings and manually configure it to connect to the proxy hosted on the pi. It's not that this setup is difficult to do, but a plug-and-play device would be even simpler and feels even more magical. What I would really like is for the Raspberry Pi to identify any http requests that come in over the Ethernet port and forward them to the proxy instead of passing them to Wi-Fi, then the proxy can connect to the

internet

, get the old version of the page and send it to the connected computer, which will think this is the real page.

This idea sounded simple enough, though I'll have to be honest with you. I don't do much networking. things in my day to day life, so figuring out how to set this up exactly was a bit tricky. Finally, after finding the right keywords which turned out to be a masked transparent proxy, I found a tutorial for exactly what I was trying to do. and finally the Internet time machine came to life. I added a display on a rotary encoder dial for a physical date selection interface and then to finish it all off I put it in a beautiful casing

made

only of the finest ABS plastic, so here it is.

Using the Internet Time Machine is as simple as plugging it into your computer, setting the date, and launching the web browser so far it seems to work on almost all computers. I've tried the imac, my xp machines, my laptop, pretty much the only thing. It didn't work on this performa mac that doesn't have an ethernet port anyway, let's start browsing. I have to admit, this makes browsing the web on retro hardware so much fun that you can simply pick a website that exists today and go back a couple of years in a row to see what Apple's website looked like is a very good example.

I can go back to 1999, fast forward one year at a time, and see all the big product announcements. Remember those fancy colored Imacs, they are cool or look at this, you can see the Windows XP web page from the day it was released and then move forward in time, add-ons are released, service packs are released and finally Microsoft starts asking you not to use XP anymore, a history of more than 13 years. to be told in less than a minute, there are even some interesting stories to see here. I tried going back to one of the older versions of the minecraft.net home page and did you know there used to be a list on the Public Servers to play site back in 2009, there were a few servers but I checked back a year later and now There are too many to fit on the screen.

The fact that I can jump to different dates with the turn of a dial really makes this a thing. I feel like traveling back in time, here is the first YouTube home page, not only can you see what the interface looked like, but you can also see what the most important videos of the day were. I forgot how much customization channel pages used to have with all their fancy backgrounds. and color schemes, did you know there was a mobile youtube site in 2007 that sounds absolutely painful and also kind of cool? 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 connecting to the Internet in the early 2000s, up to the use of original hardware in the last 10 years.

Web design has become more fluid. Web browsers have become cleaner and screen resolutions have become larger. In fact, many of these. Old sites get destroyed by modern browsers, either appearing as a misaligned mess or if the web designer was a little more careful in the past as a void with a bit of content on the side of the XP tablet or the old Imac Between fake 3D icons and chunky toolbars, web pages feel right at home. The fact that the original web was not as interactive as it is today certainly helps hide the limitations of this device, after all, the Wayback machine is a read-only file than the original.

The servers that host these web applications are long gone, so sadly I can't go back in time and buy this t-shirt or vote in this really weird MSN Kids poll for eight-year-olds, but again, most of the web in that So it was just whatever. You downloaded it to your computer, so browsing petrified versions of these websites doesn't feel much different from the real experience. Browsing the archived web breaks a few other things, although sites like the youtube player don't work properly since the

internet

archive doesn't. Don't store or stream YouTube videos, most games I've encountered span several types of not working, from crashing on startup to starting with errors and crashing during the loading process when it comes to flash or java, not much beyond of the simplest interactive content seems to work.

Well, from the internet archive, most likely due to resources the web crawler forgot to take, so no balloon tower defense, no Zack and Cody suite life, pick up at the pizza party, no Dyson telescope set, no vacuum melting frenzy. Has anyone noticed how many void-themed flash games there are? Seriously, who is going to search for games on websites? Fortunately, the 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 have to say, there's something really lovely about the 2000s web aesthetic that I had kind of forgotten about, I mean, everyone talks about the colorful, flashy 90s web, but in my opinion, it was in the 90s. next when things got interesting.

The websites ditched all the neon colors and mosaic backgrounds and opted for something a bit. More reserved but a little more skeuomorphic, we suddenly got striped wallpapers, 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 talk about all the gradients, it's kind. It's ironic how in the early 90s websites were pretty simple, mainly because the web standards at the time were pretty basic and browser support for these standards was even worse than around the year 2000, new web technologies become more common.

CSS support improves and you start to see more flash. content Java applets more sophisticated 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 to get softer and more minimalist until we get to today's giant photo infinite scrolling websites. Don't get me wrong, I like flat design, it's readable, doesn't clash with user-submitted content, and can be much more energy efficient for mobile devices with finite battery life, but man, it just sucks the personality out of the web design. . I think to some extent this design change simply symbolizes how people viewed the web in the '90s and early 2000s, the web was exciting and connecting felt like an event, like you were actually going somewhere. place, this was before the internetmobile phone was common.

So I personally remember times where I would love to come home from the real world so I could hang out in the digital world, as nerdy as it sounds, it all felt a little more personal too. Most companies had a website, but you could still find many. From sites maintained by a single person, not to mention all the small communities and forums, as I see it, a lot of the design of this era was just people trying to add their personal style to their web presence, today, the Internet It's just a fact. Online life doesn't feel as exciting when we're already at it 24/7 and the design of our sites and apps now reflects that everything seems equally utilitarian, web design never gets in the way. the way and works well. almost what you put in the template, plus someone thought we really needed those horrible infinite scrolling websites with images that fill the entire screen before I completely fell in love with it, everything was better when I was a kid, although I should say modern .

The Internet is still much better than the web of the early 2000s. For one thing, the old Internet was pretty slow and it turns out this thing is pretty good at simulating on top of that, although now I can connect whenever I want, wherever I want and although most of the content. Found on only a few sites, finding content you actually want to see on these sites is much easier than it used to be. Actually, I used to think that old web design was a bit ugly, but after building this little Internet time machine, I realized everything.

These old sites look much better in low resolution through the warm glow of an old CRT. This little device reminded me for the first time in a long time how cool the Internet felt. When it was new compared to some of my other projects, the Internet Time Machine isn't very complicated, it's just some programs written by other people that I hot glued it into a cute little box with a dial on the top, but in a way it is too. one of my favorites, it's very easy to get lost browsing the retro web on retro hardware and remembering what it was like when the internet was a little rougher but also a lot more human anyway, that's it, the internet time machine, look the way back. machine proxy powering this thing in the description something, subscribe and if you'll excuse me, I'm going to test how well it works on future websites.