Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.

When my family got our first computer in 2003, I watched in awe as the components were set up in the living room. Our wooden desk groaned under the weight of the hefty monitor. The computer tower left dents in the carpet. The future was here. And it was big.

But it was more than just a computer. It was a portal to a new world for me – a way to access something called the internet.

My parents let me log in for one hour per day. My early excursions in cyberspace left me feeling like a pioneer chopping through bushes in a strange land, browsing esoteric websites with bad graphics, message boards and clunky Flash games. At night, I snuck downstairs to boot the computer back up, looking over my shoulder at every creak of an upstairs floorboard.

But these days the internet can seem mundane by comparison. I have 24-hour access, and my go-to sites are dreary and familiar: social media platforms that can feel better suited for doomscrolling than exploration. Algorithms lead the way, like a strict tour guide on sanctioned trails cut through a once enigmatic wilderness.

So a few months ago, I went in search of some of the earliest corners of the web to see how much of it still there and find out what it has to teach us.

The web you and I know may be ending. Because of AI and some radical changes to Google Search, some worry the tools that used to send us to websites will simply give us the answers we're looking for instead. If fewer people visit websites, it could be harder for sites to make money. Some experts fear we've entered a new era that could derail the economic system that encouraged people to create websites in the first place. It's likely that this chapter of digital history is closing.

We've lost alarming amounts of our digital history. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible, according to the Pew Research Center. Niels Brügger, a professor in media and internet history at Aarhus University in Denmark, began noticing it as early as the 1990s. "The average lifetime of a website, it's around a couple of months," he says. (Read more about why there is so little left of the early internet.)

This decay has been happening since the web was created. But the older, simpler, stranger net hasn't vanished yet. Ruins of a bygone internet live on, waiting to be explored. You only need to know where to look.

There's no better place to start than the world's first website, info.cern.ch, built by the researchers who invented the World Wide Web. Today, it's dedicated to the history of the web itself. But you can also experience the first website as it existed back in 1992, thanks to a tool that simulates the first readily-accessible web browser, called the Line-Mode Browser. It's text only, and you couldn't even use a mouse in its original iteration. To visit pages about bioscience, for example, you typed the number three.

"The web existed in the early '90s, but it really was academic and had a very small user base," says Ian Milligan, associate vice-president of research, oversight and analysis at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and a historian who studies web archives. If you want to see the dawn of the modern web, he says you should start in 1996. "That's when the web really begins to pick up as the central communication medium for Western society and then international society," Milligan says.

Today, the website for the Liberal Party of Canada, the country's leading political party, is a slick and modern affair. Look back to an archived copy of........

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