From the dial-up days to the era of AI-assisted browsing, Opera’s interactive experience takes users through key milestones that helped shape the web over the past three decades.
’A time machine for the internet’s finest and weirdest moments’
If you’re reading this on your iPhone, you may want to switch to a computer for this one. Opera’s Web Rewind is a fun new website that feels like a throwback to the Flash era, packed with animations and keyboard-driven interactivity.
You interact with the site by holding or tapping the space bar, depending on which of its 31 artifacts you’re exploring. These include dial-up (complete with modem handshake tones), early email days with AOL’s ‘you’ve got mail’ and chain emails, the birth of Google, peer-to-peer file sharing, MySpace, and more.
What’s more, Opera is also running a contest, where you send in your favorite memory from the last 30 years of the web, and it might get you a trip to Switzerland, where you’ll visit CERN, or “the birthplace of the web,” as Opera puts it.
All in all, Opera’s Web Rewind is in itself a nostalgic experiment, since it evokes a version of the web that is rarely seen anymore. Whether you lived through all, most, or just a few of the last 30 years, you’ll probably have fun playing around on it.
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