Thursday 17 November 2011

The Oldest Website is ... ?

A few days ago someone sent me a link via Twitter to this website. It's the original promo website for the film Space Jam, released 15 years ago this year. The website hasn't been taken down or altered and so has become a kind of internet 'ghost'. I found it quite fascinating to compare it with modern sites.



Websites come and go as people update them, revamp them or stop funding them. If I stop paying for mine, for example, the website vanishes because my site is hosted on a server I have no control over. But there are probably thousands of sites that, just like the Space Jam site, are sitting around on the private servers of big corporations that have never been altered or deleted. Uniquely, because they were advertising a particular event, there's never been a need to update any of them.

I was discussing this with my good friend Huw Williams yesterday and we got to wondering ... what is the oldest, unaltered website still up and running? You can see a screengrab of Tim Berners-Lee's original first webpage here. But that's not a working site.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'd be fascinated to see them.

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