You know that feeling you get when you look at your haircut from the ’80s? Then the even worse feeling as your eyes drift downwards towards your outfit? It’s not that far off from the sinking feeling we here at BW got when we took a trip down the Internet’s memory lane and checked out early versions of our website by using The Wayback Machine on archive.org.
Did we really think that font looked good? Those bare text hyperlinks? And the ads for tele-personals?
If we didn’t know better, we’d say those bright neon buttons are wearing shoulder pads and a George Michael t-shirt. Yikes.
It was all the more surprising because a significant chunk of BW’s online archive was lost and/or misplaced in the process of changing servers and platforms several times. So this was the first time that many of our staff who haven’t been at the paper since it launched saw the original site. They had thought headlines from 20 years ago were hilarious enough on their own, but to then see them all dolled up like they were going to a red carpet premiere for an Atari 2600 game was the icing on the cake.
Check out the screenshots above, or take a look for yourself at http://archive.org/web/.
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