Preserving the First Decade of the Web
From Tim Berners-Lee's first server to GeoCities, WebCrawler, and the dawn of e-commerce. We capture, restore, and provide open access to the foundational layer of the internet.
Explore Captured History
Filter by era, platform, or content type. Every snapshot is verified, timestamped, and rendered with period-accurate browsers.
Research & Submission Suite
Whether you're a historian, developer, or former webmaster, our tools make it easy to save, access, and analyze early web content.
Deep Crawler
Submit a URL or sitemap. Our crawler respects robots.txt while intelligently capturing frame-based sites, framesets, and deprecated CGI scripts.
Start Crawling →Memento API
Access our index via standard Memento protocols. Query by URL, date range, or capture source. Fully compatible with CDX and WARC standards.
View Documentation →Retro Renderer
View archived pages in emulated Netscape, IE3, or Mosaic environments. Experience the exact typography, colors, and layout intent of the era.
Launch Renderer →Trend Analytics
Track technology adoption, design patterns, and content shifts across 1990–1999. Export datasets for academic and commercial research.
Explore Analytics →The Evolution of the Web & Our Archive
Parallel milestones showing how the web grew and how our preservation efforts scaled alongside it.
First Website Goes Live
info.cern.ch launches. We begin our archival mission to prevent early academic and research pages from vanishing.
Netscape & Geocities Launch
The commercial web explodes. We deploy distributed crawlers to capture the surge of personal homepages and early e-commerce.
Archive Standardization
We adopt WARC format and establish cryptographic hashing for all captures, ensuring verifiable, tamper-proof preservation.
Open Research Portal
Launch of our public API and academic partnership program. Universities begin using our datasets for digital humanities research.
Dot-Com Peak Preservation
Capture of over 2M pages before the market correction. Preservation of early SaaS, portals, and WebRing communities.
Mission & Infrastructure
Why the 1990s Matter
The first decade of the World Wide Web established the protocols, design languages, and cultural norms that define the modern internet. Without systematic preservation, this foundational layer is permanently vanishing due to link rot, server decommissioning, and format obsolescence.
1990 Web Archive operates as a non-profit digital heritage institution. We partner with universities, libraries, and independent researchers to ensure the early web remains accessible, searchable, and academically rigorous.
🔐 Verified Captures
SHA-256 hashed, timestamped, and cross-referenced with Wayback & IA datasets.
🌍 Global Nodes
Distributed storage across 12 jurisdictions for resilience and access compliance.
⚡ Modern Stack
PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Rust-based crawlers, IIIF image delivery.
🤝 Open Access
All non-commercial datasets freely available under CC BY-NC 4.0.
// Preservation Stack
> status: online
> nodes: 12/12 active
> crawl_queue: 14,203 URLs
> next_snapshot: 2h 14m
Preserve History With Us
Submit a site for archival, request bulk data access, or collaborate on preservation research.
Get in Touch
Our team reviews all submission requests within 48 hours. For academic institutions, we offer dedicated crawl scheduling and data export pipelines.