▲ 16 r/windows95+1 crossposts

Oldweb Diary — A digital museum of early internet culture, styled like Windows 95, Windows XP, and MacOS9

Features: 50+ memes with full origin stories, This Day in Internet History, Lost Media Vault, Memory Wall, and a Retro Assets Library. Switch between Win95, WinXP, and Mac OS9 themes.

Built with Next.js, Prisma, and way too much nostalgia.

oldwebdiary.com
u/aaron-coder — 3 days ago
▲ 10 r/oldinternet+1 crossposts

I built a digital museum for early internet culture — styled like Windows 95/XP/Mac OS9

Launched oldwebdiary.com — a nostalgia site dedicated to early internet culture, fully skinned like a retro desktop OS. You can switch between Win95, WinXP, and Mac OS9 themes and the whole UI changes (window chrome, taskbar, fonts, button styles, even the desktop wallpaper).

What's inside:

- 50+ memes with full origin stories (Dancing Baby, Hamster Dance, Rickroll, Doge, etc.)

- This Day in Internet History — events that happened on today's date throughout internet history

- Lost Media Vault — Flash animations and old websites that nearly disappeared, with related-media suggestions

- Memory Wall — people share their earliest internet memories (AIM, GeoCities, LimeWire...)

- Retro Assets Library — downloadable Win95 sounds, cursors, wallpapers, fonts

Stack: Next.js 16, TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma + Supabase, Tailwind v4, Cloudflare R2, Vercel. Solo build, took about four weeks evenings/weekends.

Biggest technical challenges were eliminating a flash-of-wrong-theme on page load (solved with cookie-based SSR theme detection) and getting /vercel/og to reliably render meme images in edge OG cards (turned out .webp doesn't play nice with the edge runtime).

Would love feedback — especially on the retro UI details, since that's the whole point of the site.

oldwebdiary.com

reddit.com
u/aaron-coder — 5 days ago