Here’s something fun I just stumbled upon — a site called Internet Artifacts, created by Neal Agarwal.
Once you get past some technical stuff on the first few pages, you find out all sorts of interesting things, like which song was the first mp3 file, what the first online chain mail looked like, what the first webcam was pointed at, how Yahoo! looked in its first iteration, the first thing ordered from Amazon, and the origin stories of GeoCities, Ask Jeeves, Wikipedia, Friendster, MySpace, and Napster.
You can even click on one page to hear the old AOL modem handshake noise we all sat through when logging onto the service in the 1990s. Or watch that damned animated dancing baby. And there’s a classic clip from the “Today” show in which anchors Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel and Elizabeth Vargas tried to understand the new technology by asking, “What is internet, anyway?”