To celebrate this milestone, Opera is doing something brilliantly charming: It’s put together a Web Rewind archive site that memorializes some of the best online moments and memes of the last three decades. From classic modem dialing tone sounds to MySpace and the Top Eight Friends pattern, it’s a lot of nostalgic fun.
Whether you lived through this Internet era or not, Web Rewind is a valuable lesson in history and a much-needed antidote to the spam, clutter, and AI sloppiness that dominate the modern online experience.
Explore Web Rewind
Opera is also soliciting submissions from users for memorable moments, with the authors of the best entries winning a trip to the physics laboratory CERN in Geneva, Switzerland – the original birthplace of the World Wide Web.
An interactive web museum
You’ll find the web rewind portal very simple to navigate: just follow the on-screen instructions as to which key to press. Normally, you would hold the spacebar to jump between exhibits in this Internet museum, and press the cursor keys to switch between different screens within each exhibit.
As you proceed, you get sound effects and an audio narration that tells you what you’re seeing – it’s like having a museum curator walk you through the history of the web. You can control the audio using the speaker button in the top right corner, and there are also options to switch between languages.
Also notice the link icons in the lower left corner (icons that look like part of a chain). If you find something that particularly suits you, that you want to share with others, you can take the link to the specific page.
The Web Rewind site is designed to be interactive, and there is something to do on many of the pages you encounter. When you access a LimeWire page, for example—take a look at the famous MP3 sharing software of the 1990s that had music labels in a panic—you’re able to simulate the experience of downloading a track.
And it’s brilliantly authentic too, down to the last detail: You don’t actually get the MP3, but you do get some error messages and spam pop-ups that will be familiar to anyone who’s tried downloading music from the web via LimeWire rather than actually going out and buying physical media.
Another thing you’ll notice is how educational Web Rewind is. With the LimeWire example, you’ll hear about peer-to-peer technology, how revolutionary it was, and how it changed the way files are shared on the Internet. Even if you haven’t experienced these techniques yourself, you can still learn about them.
This site is also great for rediscovering classic Internet memes that may have faded from your memory by now. Remember Grumpy Cat? Or an overly attached girlfriend? It’s easy to lose track of time while browsing these pages, there is such a rich selection of web memories to explore.
Explore Web Rewind
to join
One of the other Web Rewind exhibits I enjoyed seeing was the Dial-Up Days page. I remember well the experience of installing software via floppy disk and connecting to the Internet via a 56k modem – with all the whirring and beeping involved in establishing the connection.
In those days, going online involved an old technology known as a landline phone (you couldn’t even load WhatsApp on it), and when connected to the internet it meant the phone was out of use – so anyone calling your home only got the engage tone. If someone had to call your home, the internet had to be disconnected.
At regular points in your Web Rewind visit, you will be taken to an overview screen where you can view all the “artifacts” in the collection. On these screens, you can click back to pages you’ve already visited, or jump forward to a specific year. The option to just randomly jump around is also always available.
During my clicking I rediscovered something I once knew but had since forgotten: the Opera browser was the first browser to bring a proper web experience to mobile phones in 2002. At the time it was truly a ‘mind-blowing’ moment, to be able to load entire web pages on a small screen over a painfully slow connection.
While there’s a lot here that might make you yearn for a simpler, more peaceful time, there are some aspects of web browsing that I’m glad we’ve left behind forever. Modern technology means that the days of content buffering and not being able to load even the smallest images are now behind us.
Opera wants you to also join this Internet Museum: Click the Submit button that appears in the upper right corner, describe your memory in 500 characters (including an image or video if you need), and You have the chance to visit CERN in Switzerland. You have until Friday, March 27, 2026 to submit your submission.
You’ll take a web rewind to see technologies and brand names that have almost vanished over time, graphical user interfaces that are incredibly dated but still very charming, and much more. It’s strange to think how we’ll look at today’s apps, sites, and gadgets after the next three decades have passed.
Explore Web Rewind
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