I was looking for older versions of my home page in the web archive when it occurred to me that I can’t remember how the Google search page looked when the project started! So I hit www.google.com and traveled back to 1998!
I had forgot how the web looked back in 1998… No CSS, no fancy layouts, images and graphics. Just simple HTML with a few images. The Google Logo was totally amature, created in GIMP with a lame exclamation mark an the end!
My favorite quote comes from the company’s info page.
Google Inc. is not at present a publicly traded company, and we are currently unable to speculate on whether or when our privately-held status might change.Who could speculate anyway?! That from this simple search web page the colossus that Google is today would emerge.
The other thing I liked was the generator meta tag in the page’s source that was : “Mozilla/4.06 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.0.35 i686) [Netscape]”. Linux 2.0.35!! Those where the days!…