Think Today's Internet Is Weird? Check Out This Madness From Back In The Day

GeoCities lives! Sort of.

Sept. 2, 1969, is widely considered to be the Internet's birthday. But most of us didn't connect until decades later, when consumer-friendly products like America Online and EarthLink emerged.

To commemorate the Internet's birthday in a way that might actually mean something to you, we heartily recommend Cameron's World, a portal to some of the oddball websites that defined the World Wide Web in the 1990s.

Cameron's World

The site was created by Cameron Askin, a freelance designer based in Berlin. It collects archived versions of thousands of websites created on GeoCities, an old web page service that was purchased and ultimately shuttered by Yahoo.

"There’s some terrible stuff, but also a lot of really interesting things from a web design point of view,” Askin told Fusion in an interview last month.

He's right. Take a look at these gems (for maximum time-traveling effect, we recommend watching this first):

Cameron's World
Cameron's World
Cameron's World
Cameron's World

Pretty wild, right? The site serves as a sobering reminder of how far we've really come in our era of Wix and Squarespace -- services that let you create beautiful, if perhaps sterile, websites in no time at all.

And if nothing else: Show them to your kid the next time they complain about how slowly their high-definition video is loading on the iPad. It's kind of the "I walked 15 miles in the snow, uphill both ways" of our modern age.

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