A lot has been written about how the UK's political parties will be campaigning online during the election.

Scottish Labour is on Snapchat. The Conservatives are spending money on YouTube ads. On the other side of the world, government ministers are doing interviews in emojis. In short, politics has run face first into the internet – and the internet has got politics in a headlock and given it a kicking.

But this is just the latest stage in a long campaign by political parties to get in touch with voters over the internet. It's now almost two decades since the UK's major outfits made their first tentative steps online, and these initial websites can be still be found using the Internet Archive machine.

Understandably the early online efforts of political parties now seem a bit basic, given the potential audience at that point mainly consisted of about two dozen people equipped with boxy machines running Windows 3.1 and an AOL dial-up account.

But mainly they just seem wonderfully utopian and pioneering.