In short… it’s absolutely amazing what 12 years of online innovation can do. I recently discovered a post that used WayBackMachine to pull together a collection of corporate websites from 1996. The results were quite astonishing.

Although Internet Explorer 3.0 could run Java applets and inline media, Netscape Navigator could not, and in any case nobody felt comfortable doing anything more complicated than making a few animated GIFs. Additionally, very few web designers had even the most rudimentary of aesthetic sensibilities, and nearly half of them were clinically retarded. The internet in 1996 looks like it had been created in its entirety by a panel of 13-year-olds with Geocities accounts who had about half an hour to spare each night before bedtime.

Here is the official Lego website, for example.

They include McDonald’s, Pepsi, Best Buy, and many others. Well worth the click.