Craigslist started in 1995 as a plain email list Craig Newmark sent to friends about local events in San Francisco — not a website at all.

As more people asked to be added, Newmark's list grew into a mailing list, then a proper website by 1996, expanding from events into jobs, apartments, and the classifieds it's still known for. It has stayed famously bare-bones — plain blue links, almost no design changes — for three decades, even as it became one of the most-visited sites on the internet.