How 20 popular websites looked when they launched | Hacker News Reader

How 20 popular websites looked when they launched

telegraph.co.uk

23 pointsmixmax20 comments

This is a quick & cheap pull from archive.org. There's no way twitter.com used times new roman on the frontpage in 2006. The BBC entry says it's from 1997, yet the screenshot clearly says 1. december 1998. DELL has broken images. The flickr.com screenshot is so broken that it makes me wonder if the journalist/intern/whoever made this junk even looked at the images. Telegraph.co.uk says it's launched in 1994, yet the screenshot says 2002 -- and that's the website of the very paper that's presenting this, for crying out loud.

In other news: you can amuse yourself for a while by plugging random addresses into archive.org.

Actually I loved the twitter.com screenshot - especially the Times New Roman font - IMO it's much better than the site's current generic 2.0 look. So alive and breathing. If I saw an online community with a similar aesthetics today, I'd probably join it!

CSS is missing from many of these.

Apple website launched in 1987? Somehow, I don't trust it that much.

Deleted comment

There was no web at the time, though. Apple may have used that domain for other internet services, but saying they launched their website in 1987 is absurd.

A domain does not a website make.

Screenshots of Apple.com every year since 1996:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernelpanic/sets/283374/

Is it just me, or did myspace.com look better then?

It's amazing how little some of them have changed (Google, Craigslist especially)

I was going to say "It's amazing how terrible they all look, and how much they have changed."

The colors may be the same, but nothing else is for either of those sites. You can tell that the recent versions of Google and Facebook have designers at work, and the early ones had little to no oversight from a GD.

I think the takeaway here is that a good design won't make you successful, and it's not even a component of being successful. But one you become successful, you should clean up your home page.

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." Steve Jobs

http://www.drudgereport.com/ has changed very little also. I rank it as one of the most useful websites on the internet (for me).

Interesting that there's a correlation between sites that haven't changed much and sites that are doing extremely well.

I would be more interested in seeing the initial frontpages of newer services (launched in 2004 or later). It would be interesting to see how various companies have followed the principle of "launch early and iterate".

It's harder to tell with sites launched around the mid-90s, when webpages were a lot less sophisticated.

This seems like slow news to me: poke about in wayback machine and put it in the newspaper. It's not even accurate.

Wow, craigslist hasn't changed much at all.

Damn, Drudge Report used to look slick.

Amazingly Amazon did not change much.

That's because their screenshot is wildly inaccurate.

Amazon's original page was totally different - grey background, serif text, pyramid-shaped logo of an abstract "river" in a maroon background, forming an A. The whole identity was different.

Amazon has changed HUGELY.

The screenshot they have is, at most, 4 or 5 years old, around the time of their biggest overhaul. Nothing like the original.

EDIT: Found this article that has genuine historical Amazon screenshots http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo-...

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