I thought you were actually going to show ugly web sites that suffered from bizarre design decisions. And the lack of context on the time frame of the early sites is at best lazy, at worst a misrepresentation of the constraints of HTML, dial up connections and computer constraints of the mid 90's. In 1996-97 javascript was barely around - heck, frames were still being used on a lot of sites. Most people were on dial up connections. If they were lucky 9600 baud, for a lot of people more like 5400 baud. Computers were expensive, a lot of people didn't have access to newer faster ones and public web sites were deliberately plain with that in mind.

The scripting and graphic capabilities of the browser and the computers have changed so enormously since then.

More to the point government sites such as NASA and the Whitehouse followed a deliberate trailing edge philosophy to try and ensure that people on slow connections and computers could access the site.

While I don't recall when the suit was settled - MTV.com was originally registered and created by Adam Curry - the VJ.

Google's site hasn't changed enormously - streamline graphic still lots of white space. The 98 page wasn't awesome - but certainly wasn't hideous. Mixing 2005 Facebook in makes no sense either.

The only one that really belongs - the McDonalds site. Ugly, bizarre and full of bad design decisions. Thankfully, I've got a fat broadband pipe or this slideshow would have been an even bigger waste of time.

Web design AND WRITING still sucks bigtime.

The Beast is an exception among major sites to have some actual art direction. The writing? Well, at least sprightly. Sometimes pretty dumb.

But, Tina, dammit, your smart. Make this site as smart as VF and the New Yorker were under you.

Where are the GIF animations? The flashing and scrolling text?

Indie record label Subpop has fully embraced the return of HTML 1.0 as so-bad-it's-good marketing. Check out the recent sampler (search for subpop sampler if the link below is missing):

http://www.subpop.com/cybersex

And just now while showing this to someone we noticed a major factual error. Apple may have registered it's Apple.com domain name in 1987 it could not have "registered its website" unless they somehow traveled back through time (leaving aside the fact that domain names for the Internet are registered - not websites for the World Wide Web - a protocol that runs over the Internet ).

"Apple has always been an early adopter. When the company registered its Web site in 1987, it became the internet's 64th dot-com address."

I don't find any history of an Apple website before 1996. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://apple.com

The web did not exist in 1987. Tim Berners-Lee didn't even write the proposal for the World Wide Web until 1989. The first Web site at CERN, went live on August 6th,1991.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

And in 1992 when I first worked with the web there were only 12 web sites in the world. And you used a text based browser called Lynx to access them by typing the number of link and hitting the enter key. Mosaic (the first graphical browser from Marc Andressen and crowd at UIUC) came out in 1993.

First there were pictures, then animated graphics, then frames (a bad time in design:-)), then video. The evolution of web technology. But please get the basic facts correct.

when facebook was thefacebook.com, if you accidentally went to "facebook.com", you came across a site to order yearbook-style photo books for your business or organization. also, it was really exciting to see which school would pop up next so that you could go find long-lost people on it. the day my harvard buddy friended me, there were only four schools in the system, and your page basically consisted of your info, the wall, messaging, and the power to poke people. and to think when my buddy told me it would be the "next big thing", i told him he was full of shit -- and then friended him anyway.

As a web designer in 1996 the company I worked for designed websites for Fortune 500 companys. They charged between $250,000-$500,000 for the website design and hosting. The websites typically consisted of scanned/ocrs of the company's annual report. Tables and frames were common, Netscape was the only browser as far as our clients were concerned. Good times.

Also remember that AOL wasn't "on the internet" until the late 1990s I recall the horror on Usenet when AOL and MSN users started to "invade"...

Bring back gopher!

I think I got on the web about 1995 with our first computer with Windows. My savvy 13-yr old tutor was using something he called a "bulletin board"? AOL was ny portal but Josh steered me to Netscape! I found Ask Jeeves before he did. Was such an early user of Amazon that Jeff Bozos emailed me himself. Still surfing. Marigold