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Guides & stories

34 deep dives into internet history — the real stories, not the myths.

The First Website Ever Made

The Story of the First .com Domain

GeoCities: The Rise and Fall of the Internet's Strangest Neighborhood

The Real Story Behind "404 Not Found"

The Away-Message Era: How AIM Taught a Generation to Perform Being Absent

The True Story of Spam: How Junk Email Got Its Name

Napster: The Brief Run That Changed Music Forever

What Dial-Up Internet Actually Was, and Why It Sounded Like That

The Birth of the Emoji: From a 12x12 Pixel Grid to a Global Language

ICQ and the "Uh-Oh": How One Sound Defined an Era

The Dot-Com Crash, Explained Simply

The World's First Webcam Was Watching a Coffee Pot

How the @ Symbol Became Email's Most Important Character

The Accidental Invention of the Web Cookie

Comic Sans: How a Cartoon Dog's Font Became the Internet's Punching Bag

AOL, "You've Got Mail," and the Mailer CDs That Were Everywhere

Blink Tags and Marquee Text: A Eulogy for the Ugliest Web

The Wayback Machine: Who Is Archiving the Internet, and Why

MySpace and the Invention of the "Top 8"

The Story of the First Tweet: "just setting up my twttr"

How Chat Rooms Shaped Early Internet Friendships

The Strange History of the CAPTCHA

The Webring: How the Old Internet Linked Itself Together by Hand

From BBS to Broadband: A Short History of Getting Online

The Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Sold

10 Internet Firsts You Probably Didn't Know

Notable Dead Websites and Apps People Still Miss

The Earliest Social Networks, Before Facebook

Iconic Error and System Messages of the Old Web

A Brief History of Internet Slang, Decade by Decade

A Short History of the Web Browser, From Mosaic to Now

How People Searched the Web Before Google

A History of the Internet in 10 Sounds

The First Online Purchases: What People Actually Bought