I always skipped those old sites thinking they were boring. Then I found a web ring for amateur radio fans called 'Ham Radio Hideout'. It links to pages with homemade antenna plans and chat logs from the 90s. One guy posted his failed experiments with crystal sets, which was honestly inspiring. Now I see how raw and real the web used to be before everything got polished. Why don't we value these slices of history more? Check out hamradiohideout.net to get what I mean.
Every page was a mess of broken images and text. Setting the user agent to an old version cleared it right up.
Archiving the internet shouldn't feel like digging through digital rubble.