Figuring out the age of the Internet is like figuring out the age of the universe: We could date it back to the 1960s and ARPANET, or the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol in 1983, or the launch of America Online in 1985, or the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, or maybe the creation of the Netscape browser in 1994.
However you date the inception of the Internet, two things are inarguably true: The technology has changed modern life in fundamental ways, and the modern Internet is absolutely rotten with abandonware. Not only is it chock-a-block with dead links and missing data, but many of the tools that we once used enthusiastically are either completely dead or exist today as ghostly, barely-functioning time capsules. Heck, Google alone has killed dozens of tools that it launched with great fanfare and then almost immediately abandoned.
Sometimes this is due to changing technologies—there were dozens of search engines prior to Google’s total domination of the space, after all—and sometimes it’s due to good old-fashioned capitalist competition. Whatever the reason, there are a lot of old Internet relics we left behind, and folks of a certain age might be forgiven for having a lingering affection for them. Or a lingering morbid curiosity, because sometimes there’s a definite WTF element to the old tools we used to rely on. Here are some of the Internet relics we left behind as we rocket relentlessly into the future.