Retro Computing
195 sites
https://wezm.net/v2/posts/2025/website-fit-for-1999
Wesley Moore documents his journey building a retro-styled personal website written in HTML4 and served over plain HTTP, designed to work on vintage browsers like IE 4 on Mac OS 8.1. The post covers experimenting with hosting on a RISC-V ESP32-C3 microcontroller using bare-metal Rust before settling on a more practical home server setup, making it a fascinating read for anyone interested in old-web aesthetics and modern tinkering.
https://restorativland.org/
Restorativland is an ambitious preservation project dedicated to excavating and restoring shut-down web ruins like GeoCities, MySpace Music, and AOL Hometown into searchable, visitable, and remixable archives. Positioned somewhere between a library and a living museum, the project works to close the gap between archival and public visibility of the lost early web.
http://mauricesden.net/
Maurice's Den is the charmingly retro homepage of Maurice the Rat and his hare companion Hazel, two fictional time-travelling characters who collect vintage technology and explore old junk across time and space. The site features a dedicated Vintage Tech section, commissioned character art, and a heartfelt manifesto about recapturing the spirit of the old web, complete with a guestbook and TheOldNet webring membership.
https://soft.lafibre.info/
A comprehensive archive of old Linux and OS ISO files organized by kernel version, spanning from 1994 through the 2010s, maintained by Vivien Gueant. Visitors can download vintage distributions like Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, and even OS/2 Warp directly for use with VirtualBox or physical media.
https://lowendmac.com/2013/11-no-cost-tips-for-optimizing-mac-os-x-10-4-tiger-performance
Low End Mac is a long-running Apple resource site dedicated to getting the most out of older Mac hardware, with this article offering 11 free performance tips specifically for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on G3, G4, G5, and early Intel Macs. With over 2 million hits, this guide by Ed Eubanks Jr covers practical optimizations like managing startup items, removing unused language files, and controlling fan speeds to keep aging Macs running smoothly.
http://1x-upon.com/
Created by net artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, this project recreates three significant contemporary websites as they might have appeared in late 1997, complete with dial-up speed throttling, frames-based HTML, and a recommendation to view on Netscape Navigator 4.03 under Windows 95. It is a nostalgic and conceptual art piece that lovingly preserves the aesthetic and technical spirit of the early web era.
https://cobradile.neocities.org/
Còbra! is a multilingual Glaswegian whose Neocities homepage showcases a passion for retro games, vintage tech, and old media, with the intro written in Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and even Ainu. The site is a charming old-web personal space with guestbook, webrings, and a distinctly retro aesthetic that reflects the creator's love of collecting classic technology and media.
https://ericexperiment.com/
Eric's personal tech site covers retro computing projects with impressive depth, including a custom-built 486 computer, Toshiba Libretto repairs, Brazilian Famiclones, and vintage web nostalgia. The site spans a wide range of hands-on topics from 3D printing to woodworking, but retro hardware builds and old-school computing are clearly the heart of the experiment.
https://recoil.sourceforge.net/
RECOIL (Retro Computer Image Library) is a free, open-source image viewer and converter that opens 552 native picture formats from vintage platforms including Commodore, Amiga, Atari, ZX Spectrum, and MSX. Available as standalone apps and plugins for Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and in-browser, it is an essential tool for anyone preserving or exploring old-school computer graphics.