Find Animated GIFs From the Early Web With GifCities

If you are surfing the web in the age of hand-encoded HTML websites, then you definitely know that GIFs are the most important part of a good website. How else would you notify your readers that your site is still under construction? GifCities helps you find these gifs from the old world wide web.

GifCities is a fun project from the web archive to celebrate their 20th anniversary. They mined their GeoCities archives to find over 4.5 million GIFs from classic web hosting. GeoCities was of course a free host in the 90s that served as a playground for anyone looking to have their own website on the internet. And when it came to GIFs, the limited bandwidth and storage space of the era played a role in a certain image aesthetics that you could politely call “limited.” Old GIFs often resembled pixel art from video games, using just a few colors with a few frames of animation to bring your home page to life. Check out their website to relive the classic era of the world wide web.

GifCities via Boingboing

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