The first site it recommended was “everyone’s favorite plastic oracle, on line,” a place where you could consult a Magic 8-Ball. It’s funny now: The tenor of the early web, with its gimmicks and sense of play, was eventually repeated in the early app environment. Remember when having an iPhone meant demonstrating a smattering of silly apps—things like Magic 8-Balls, virtual lighters, and digital beer that disappeared when you tilted the device?

The Magic 8-Ball website from 1995 is still live, remarkably, but it has changed. “The ‘Magic 8-Ball’ went away because of a letter from Tyco’s lawyers indicating that they didn't appreciate my abuse of their Copyright,” a message on the site now says. “Thank you Tyco, for giving me the impetus to create a far cooler web site.”

Of the 26 sites the Times recommended visiting that year, just four still work. Along with the Magic 8-Ball, there’s the website for Japan’s Science and Technology Agency, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Internet Underground Music Archive. That site only kind of exists anymore—it still has a working homepage, but it redirects to the Internet Archive when you click.

Same with Intrrr Nrrrd, which lives on only in the context of leading you to an archive of the broader Etext Archives site where it was once published. (And the earliest appearance of that website in the WayBack Machine isn’t until 1999; so it’s anyone’s guess what it looked like in 1995.)

The vanished pages are many.

Most of the URLs the Times printed in 1995 are now dead, including those that led to a guide for backpackers and wilderness trekkers; a livestream of a coffee pot; a Grateful Dead fan page; a map of estuaries; a federal spending website; a hub for online gaming; a gardening site; a site devoted to legislation affecting Massachusetts; Wired’s coverage of legal issues in cyberspace; Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology; a graphic novel about living with cancer; an illustrated explanation of an infamous flaw in Intel's Pentium chip; a cybermall; a site for making hotel reservations in San Francisco; a site dedicated to subway routes; a virtual frog dissection; a wine-tasting club; a digital map viewer that let you zoom in to any spot on Earth; Yahoo’s internet directory from when it was still hosted by Stanford; and an informational site about zebrafish.

In some cases, you can piece together traces of what once was. There’s still a website for the Museum of Paleontology, for instance, it’s just not the same one that existed in 1995.

In other cases, there are records of sites that no longer work. That’s because some of them were legendary in their time. The coffee pot site, based on what is believed to have been the first webcam, ran for nearly eight years and remains memorialized since it went dark in 2001. The map viewer was similarly groundbreaking—it was one of the earliest mapping sites on the web, launched in 1993, though it looks primitive by today’s satellite-imagery standards. You can still catch a glimpse of it on the Internet Archive.

“Each of the thousands of World Wide Web sites opens with a ‘home page,’” the Times had written, “which serves as both a table of contents and Alice's rabbit hole into a world that may be beautiful, bizarre, or banal.”