Every artifact on the old web solved a problem that platforms later solved for you, and took from you in the process. Webrings were discovery without an algorithm. Guestbooks were comments you owned. Hit counters were analytics you owned. 88x31 buttons were a peer-to-peer ad network with no ad network.

This is a field guide to those artifacts. Each plate documents one of them, shows how it worked, lets you actually use it, and names the problem it solved. Each plate is rendered in the visual dialect of the thing it documents, so a plate on blinkies looks like 2003 and a plate on forums looks like an ANSI terminal.

A field guide is never finished. New plates get filed as they are built, and the directory shows what exists so far.

Built during August 2026 for Netlify's Back to School challenge, which asks for one working app a day that teaches something. Made by David V. Kimball.

Every graphic here is rehosted locally, never hotlinked, and listed on the credits page. If something here is yours and you want it taken down, say so and it comes down.