The internet celebrated its 50th birthday in 2019. However, only certain research institutes or universities were aware of the teenage years of the World Wide Web. The rest of humanity only found out about the big, wide online world from the 1990s onwards. Today almost nothing works without the internet. Thanks to Google, almost no question remains unanswered. However, Google itself cannot answer one question: What would Google have looked like in the 1980s?
Google didn’t open its online doors in the 1980s, but only in 1997. If you want to look at pictures from the early days of the search engine, this will help Wayback Machine. This is a kind of web archive. The site has been collecting screenshots from all kinds of websites since 1996. The first Google entry dates from November 11, 1998. At that time, the search engine was still in the beta phase. The appearance is still very simple and has nothing to do with the Google as most people know it today.
Elaborate visualizations also make no sense, because the Internet was not a data superhighway back then. Rather, the journey on the web is more like a leisurely drive on a country road. The Internet is therefore primarily text-based, but much more convenient to use than just a few years ago.
Google search in the style of the 1980s – project makes it possible
Some resourceful developers have therefore asked themselves what globally popular and well-known websites would have looked like in the 1980s. For this purpose, the web design team at Mass:Werk in Austria programmed an interface on which the Google homepage appears as if the company had already started its search engine in the 1980s.
The interface may look familiar to some older computer fans. Before Microsoft conquered the computer world with Windows, the company earned its money with the operating system MS-DOS – short for: Microsoft Disk Operating System. In order to start certain processes on MS-DOS, it was necessary to enter predefined shortcuts. At that time, computers didn’t do anything without entering a command.
So that Google can also be fun in 80s style, the developers of Mass:Werk have included a small list of commands. So even DOS laymen can start the Google simulation.
Also read: This is what popular websites used to look like
Google search by punch card
The site also features a 1980s-style version of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.
If you want to go even further back: Mass:Werk also offers a variant of Google from the 1960s. The creators call the simulation with a wink: “Google 60 – Search Mad Men Style” – based on the TV series “Mad Men”, which tells dramatic stories from a New York advertising agency in the 1960s.
The 1960s search with Google works with a punch card. All results end up on paper using a dot matrix printer – virtually, of course. The time required to print out all the results is particularly realistic. In addition to the loving visual design, the Mass:Werk team also paid attention to the appropriate background noise. In the 1980s look, the user hears the typical modem noise from the telephone line. For 1960s-style Google searches, the sound of the print head sliding back and forth provides the perfect setting.
If you want to see the fun for yourself: Here is the 80s-style Google search and here you are looking in 60s style of the advertising agency Mad Men.
Incidentally, the current project is not the first to show how people surfed the Internet decades ago. TECHBOOK previously reported on a website from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where users can try out how people got online 30 years ago.