If you cut your chops on the web during the era of hand-coded HTML websites, then you definitely know that the most important part of a good site are the GIFs. How else would you notify your readers that your site is still “under construction”? GifCities helps you find those GIFs from the old World Wide Web.




GifCities is a fun project from the Internet Archive to celebrate their 20th anniversary. They mined their GeoCities archives to find over 4.5 million GIFs from the classic web host. GeoCities, of course, was a free host in the 90s that served as a playground to anyone who wanted to have their very own site on the internet. And when it came to GIFs, the limited bandwidth and storage space of that era played into a certain image aesthetic that you might politely call “limited.” Old GIFs were often like pixel art from video games, utilizing a just a handful of colors with just a few frames of animation to bring a little life to your homepage. Head over to their site to relive the classic era of the World Wide Web.

GifCities via Boingboing