Everything you need to know about our web preservation platform, the early internet, and how we're keeping digital history alive.
New to web archiving? Our Starter Plan lets you archive up to 10,000 pages for free. No credit card required. Simply create an account and start preserving web history today.
1990 Web Archive is a digital preservation platform dedicated to capturing, storing, and rendering the early web — from its birth in 1991 through the dot-com boom and beyond. We preserve HTML pages, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, GIF animations, MIDI music files, and all the visual quirks that made the early internet unique.
Think of us as a digital museum for the World Wide Web. Every page we archive is time-stamped, cryptographically verified, and rendered in its original form for future generations.
The year 1990 marks a pivotal moment: Tim Berners-Lee published the proposal for the WorldWideWeb project in March 1990, and the first website went live in 1991. By starting from 1990, we capture the conceptual origins and the earliest implementations of web technology.
The 1990s decade produced an extraordinary cultural artifact — the first generation of web pages, personal homepages, bulletin boards, and early e-commerce. These are irreplaceable digital artifacts that define our internet heritage.
The Internet Archive is an incredible resource, but it has known limitations with early web content:
We address these by using emulated rendering engines specific to each era (Netscape 3, IE 4, etc.), full asset recovery, and our specialized search across visual styles, technologies, and time periods.
Yes! Founded in 2019 by a team of digital preservationists and web historians, 1990 Web Archive is a registered company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. We partner with universities, libraries, and cultural institutions worldwide to preserve web history.
We are also open-source — our core crawling and rendering tools are available on GitHub under the MIT license.
Our archive currently contains 4.2 million pages spanning 1990–2009, with over 892,000 unique HTML documents, 340,000 restored GIF animations, 180,000 recovered GeoCities pages, and over 2 million media assets (images, MIDI files, sounds, etc.).
We add approximately 50,000 new pages per month through continuous crawling and from contributions by our community of archivists.
Our archive covers these major eras:
Yes! Use our search bar to look up URLs, domain names, keywords, or even visual descriptions like "tiled background" or "animated divider." Our search index includes:
If a page isn't in our archive yet, you can request an archive and we'll crawl and preserve it for you.
Our rendering engine aims for pixel-level accuracy. We use era-specific rendering modes that replicate:
<hr> styles<blink> effects (yes, we brought it back)You can toggle between "Authentic" (original) and "Accessible" (modernized) rendering modes.
We preserve content in multiple formats to ensure long-term accessibility:
Absolutely! Research access is one of our core missions. We offer free academic access to all verified researchers, students, and educators at accredited institutions. Simply register with your institutional email (@.edu or equivalent) to get instant access.
Our platform includes research tools such as timeline views, technology adoption charts, visual style evolution maps, and exportable datasets for computational analysis.
Yes. Research and Business plan users can export:
All exports include Creative Commons Attribution licensing information for proper academic citation.
Yes! We publish quarterly Web Evolution Reports covering:
Reports are available to all users and can be downloaded as PDF or accessed via our public dashboard.
We welcome partnerships with universities, libraries, museums, and government archives. Partnership benefits include:
Contact our partnerships team to learn more.
Yes! Our Starter plan is completely free and includes:
Free accounts require no credit card and are available immediately upon registration. Students and educators with verified institutional emails get extended limits.
Our Business plan ($99/month) includes everything in Starter plus:
Yes — academic access is free. Verified researchers and students get full Business plan features at no cost. This includes API access, bulk export, advanced search, and all rendering modes.
Additionally, we offer grant funding for institutions that wish to use our platform for large-scale preservation projects. Grants can cover up to 100% of platform costs for qualifying projects.
Of course. All paid plans are month-to-month with no long-term commitment. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time from your account settings. If you cancel, your archived data remains accessible for 12 months after cancellation, so you can pick it up again anytime.
We use a multi-layered recovery approach:
Our recovery rate for pre-2000 pages is approximately 73%, meaning 73% of pages we target have recoverable content.
Our RESTful API provides programmatic access to the entire archive:
GET /api/v2/search — Full-text and filtered searchGET /api/v2/archive/{url} — Retrieve archived page and metadataPOST /api/v2/archive — Submit a page for archivingGET /api/v2/trends — Web evolution trend dataGET /api/v2/export — Bulk export in multiple formatsAPI documentation with code examples in Python, JavaScript, and cURL is available at docs.1990webarchive.com/api.
Partially. Our core crawling and rendering engines are open source under the MIT license:
1990crawler — Distributed web crawler optimized for legacy content1990render — Era-specific rendering engine1990reconstruct — Page recovery and reconstruction toolkitThe full platform (search interface, user management, analytics) is proprietary, but we welcome community contributions to our open-source tools via GitHub.
We follow the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) reference model and implement:
Yes! You can submit any web page for preservation by:
All submitted pages go through a verification process to ensure they meet our preservation standards. Accepted submissions are added to the archive within 24 hours.
Every archived page has a permanent citation ID and is assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) upon archiving. To get a citation:
Citations include our cryptographic signature to verify the integrity of the archived content.
Yes! Our archive includes content in 42 languages. Our crawler supports:
Our search engine handles multi-language queries and can search across language boundaries. The largest non-English collections are Japanese (420K pages), German (310K), and French (280K).
Our headquarters is in San Francisco, CA at 1990 Web Archive Plaza. We also have remote offices in Berlin, Tokyo, and São Paulo.
Our data centers are distributed across six regions: US East, US West, EU West, EU Central, Asia Pacific, and South America, ensuring redundancy and low-latency access worldwide.
Our team is here to help. Reach out through any of these channels — we typically respond within 24 hours.