Check out the first generation of your favorite websites

Welcome to the first annual Verge Hack Week. We’re totally blowing up our site: we’ve given our reporters and editors the entire week to play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas, while members of our amazing product team have gathered in New York to help build all sorts of interesting new things. Learn more.

Before websites were wild, dynamic, all-encompassing entities that contained the depressing entirety of the human experience, they were simple affairs: a phone number, a mailing address, a bulletin board, and maybe even a random chat room if you were really lucky. It was a simpler — and uglier — era. Thanks to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we've travelled back in time to see what some our favorite sites looked like in their salad days and we invite you to look over our shoulders. Ladies and gentlemen...start your modems!