The following is a partial list of websites founded before 1995. Of the thousands of website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

s founded prior to 1995, those appearing here are noteworthy for one or more of the following reasons:

• They have existed continuously through the present (albeit in some cases with different names)
• They made formative contributions to the history of the world wide web
  History of the World Wide Web
  The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does...
  
  
• They helped shaped certain modern Web content, such as webcomics and weblogs

1991

Gopher Search Engine:One of the Internet's earliest search engines.
CERN: The link is a snapshot of the CERN

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

 site, the first website, as of November 1992. The Web was publicly announced (via a posting to [news:alt.hypertext alt.hypertext]) on August 6, 1991.
World Wide Web Virtual Library

World Wide Web Virtual Library

The World Wide Web Virtual Library was the first index of content on the World Wide Web and still operates as a directory of e-texts and information sources on the web. It was started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and the World Wide Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva...

: Originally Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

's web catalog at CERN.
Digital Picture Archive on the 17th Floor: First operating from Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology , also known as TU Delft, is the largest and oldest Dutch public technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands...

 as an anonymous FTP site, then a gopher server and finally a WWW server, this collection of miscellaneous digital images was one of the first image repositories. By 1994 it had to be throttled back because the traffic was overwhelming the networks at Delft.
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S...

: Paul Kunz from SLAC visited Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in September 1991. He was impressed by the WWW project and brought a copy of the software back to Stanford. SLAC launched the first web server in North America on December 12, 1991.

1992

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...

: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications site was an early home to the NCSA Mosaic web browser, as well as documentation on the web and a "What's New?" list which many people used as an early web directory.
Fermilab

Fermilab

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics...

: Second web server in North America, following in the trend of high-energy physics laboratories.
SunSITE

Sunsite

SunSITE is a network of Internet servers providing archives of information, software and other publicly available resources...

: Early, comprehensive archiving project. Project as a whole started in 1992 and was quick to move to the web.

1993

By the end of 1993, there were 623 websites, according to a study by MIT Researcher Matthew Gray.

deoxy.org: A conceptual offering of philosophic technoshamanism, the site known as The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension is the last word on evolutionary ideas and knowledge.
Doctor Fun

Doctor Fun

Doctor Fun is a webcomic by David Farley, which ran from September 24, 1993 to June 9, 2006. It was one of the first online comics. It was preceded by Witches and Stitches which was distributed via CompuServe in 1985, and Where the Buffalo Roam which was distributed via Usenet in 1991. Dr...

: One of the first webcomic

Webcomic

Webcomics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or often in self-published books....

s, noted by the NCSA

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...

 as "a major breakthrough for the Web".
The LANL preprint archive: Web access to thousands of papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and biology; developed out of earlier gopher, ftp, and e-mail archives at Los Alamos. Now housed at lanl.arxiv.org
Global Network Navigator

Global Network Navigator

The Global Network Navigator was the first commercial web publicationand the first web site to offer clickable advertisements, now commonly referred to as "banner ads." The first such internet ad was sold by GNN to Heller Ehrman LLP....

: Example of an early web directory

Web directory

A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links....

, and one of the Web's first commercial sites. Created by O'Reilly Media

O'Reilly Media

O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics...

.
Heaven's Gate: A spin off of Heaven's Gate BBS, a pet memorial website.
The Internet Movie Database:Founded in 1989 by participants in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies, the IMDB was rolled out on the web in late 1993, hosted by the computer science department of Cardiff University

Cardiff University

Cardiff University is a leading research university located in the Cathays Park area of Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. It received its Royal charter in 1883 and is a member of the Russell Group of Universities. The university is consistently recognised as providing high quality research-based...

 in Wales.
Internet Underground Music Archive

Internet Underground Music Archive

The Internet Underground Music Archive was a pioneer of online music. IUMA was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993, for the purpose of providing a venue for unsigned artists to share their music and communicate with their audience...

: Created by students at the University of California, Santa Cruz

University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...

 to help promote unsigned musical artists. Music was shared using the MP2 format, presaging the later extreme popularity of MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

 sharing and Online music store

Online music store

An online music store is an online business which sells audio files, usually music, on a per-song and/or subscription basis. It may be differentiated from music streaming services in that the music store offers the actual music file, while streaming services offer partial or full listening without...

s.
SITO

SITO

SITO is an online artist collective which began in January 1993, making it one of the oldest Internet-based art organizations. It was started by Ed Stastny and has been maintained by Stastny and a group of volunteers and supporters...

: After a start as an anonymous ftp-based art gallery and collaborative collective, the OTIS project (later SITO) moves to the web thanks to SunSITE

Sunsite

SunSITE is a network of Internet servers providing archives of information, software and other publicly available resources...

's hosting.
The Tech: The MIT campus newspaper, The Tech, claims to be the first newspaper to deliver content over the Web, beginning in May 1993.
MTV

MTV

MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....

: The music television network's domain was registered in 1993 by VJ Adam Curry

Adam Curry

Adam Clark Curry is a broadcasting and Internet personality well known for his stint from 1987 to 1994 as a video jockey on the music video channel MTV. In the mid-1990s, Curry was a World Wide Web entrepreneur and one of the first celebrities to personally create and administer a Web site...

, who personally ran a small unofficial site.
PARC Map Server:Arguably the earliest precursor of MapQuest

MapQuest

MapQuest is an American free online web mapping service owned by AOL. The company was founded in 1967 as Cartographic Services, a division of R.R. Donnelley & Sons in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1969. When it became an independent company in 1994, it was...

 and Google Maps

Google Maps

Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...

. PARC Researcher Steve Putz tied an existing map viewing program to the web. Now defunct.
Principia Cybernetica

Principia Cybernetica

Principia Cybernetica is an international cooperation of scientists in the field of cybernetics and systems science, especially known for their Principia Cybernetica Web website...

: Probably the first complex, collaborative knowledge system, sporting a hierarchical structure, index, map, annotations, search, plenty of hyperlinks, etc. Designed by Francis Heylighen

Francis Heylighen

Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist, and research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels, where he directs the transdisciplinary research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition".-Biography:Francis Heylighen was born on...

, Cliff Joslyn

Cliff Joslyn

Cliff Joslyn is an American cognitive scientist, cyberneticist, and currently Chief Scientist for Knowledge Sciences at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, USA.- Biography :...

 and Valentin Turchin

Valentin Turchin

Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin was a Soviet and American cybernetician and computer scientist. He developed the Refal programming language, the theory of metasystem transitions and the notion of supercompilation...

 to develop a cybernetic philosophy.
ExPASy

ExPASy

ExPASy is a bioinformatics resource portal operated by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and in particular the SIB Web Team. It is an extensible and integrative portal accessing many scientific resources, databases and software tools in different areas of life sciences...

: The first life sciences

Life sciences

The life sciences comprise the fields of science that involve the scientific study of living organisms, like plants, animals, and human beings. While biology remains the centerpiece of the life sciences, technological advances in molecular biology and biotechnology have led to a burgeoning of...

 web site. Still active
Trojan room coffee pot

Trojan room coffee pot

The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world's first webcam. The coffee pot was located in the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge...

: The first webcam

Webcam

A webcam is a video camera that feeds its images in real time to a computer or computer network, often via USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi.Their most popular use is the establishment of video links, permitting computers to act as videophones or videoconference stations. This common use as a video camera...

.
Trincoll Journal: a multimedia magazine published by students at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut.

1994

By mid-1994 there were 2738 websites, according to Gray's statistics; by the end of the year, more than 10,000.

Art.Net

Art.Net

Art.Net is a non-profit web-based artist collective of more than 450 artists, poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, animators, hacker artists, and other creative people from around the world, aimed at helping artists share their works on the World Wide Web...

:"Art on the Net", created by Lile Elam in June 1994 to showcase the artwork of San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

 artists as well as other international artists. It offered free linkage and hosts extensive links to other artists' sites.
Art Crimes: The first graffiti art site began to archive photos from around the world, creating an important academic resource as well as a thriving online community.
The Amazing FishCam : A webcam pointed at a fishtank located at Netscape

Netscape

Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

 headquarters. According to a contemporaneous article by The Economist

The Economist

The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...

, "In its audacious uselessness—and that of thousands of ego trips like it—lie the seeds of the Internet revolution."
Bianca's Smut Shack

Bianca.com

bianca.com, informally known as Bianca's Smut Shack, was an alternative virtual community that was created on 14 February 1994 by a group of Chicago dot-com software developers including David Thau and Chris Miller. bianca was the world's first web-based chat room...

:An early web-based chatroom and online community

Online community

An online community is a virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership ritual. An online community can take the form of an information system where anyone can post content, such as a Bulletin board system or one where only a restricted...

 known for raucous free speech and deviant behavior

Deviant Behavior

Deviant Behavior is an interdisciplinary journal which focuses on social deviance, including criminal, sexual, and narcotic behaviors.The journal is published by Taylor and Francis, Inc., and was ranked 41st out of 46 psychology journals and 46th out of 90 sociology journals in 2004 by the...

.
Birmingham City Council

Birmingham City Council

The Birmingham City Council is the body responsible for the governance of the City of Birmingham in England, which has been a metropolitan district since 1974. It is the most populated local authority in the United Kingdom with, following a reorganisation of boundaries in June 2004, 120 Birmingham...

: early local government site, initially hosted by the University of Birmingham

University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...

 at http://assist.cs.bham.ac.uk:8080/, latterly at http://www.birmingham.gov.uk
Darwin Awards:Honoring those who improve the species ... by accidentally removing themselves from it.
Einet Galaxy: Claims to be the first searchable web catalog; originally created at the Einet division of the MCC Research Consortium at the University of Texas, Austin. It passed through several commercial owners and is now run by Logika Corporation.
First Virtual

First Virtual

First Virtual Holdings was a company formed in early 1994 to facilitate Internet commerce. The first product offering from First Virtual was an Internet payment system, which was developed quietly and publicly announced as a fully operational open Internet service on October 15, 1994.First Virtual...

: First "cyber-bank".
FogCam!: World's oldest still operating webcam

Webcam

A webcam is a video camera that feeds its images in real time to a computer or computer network, often via USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi.Their most popular use is the establishment of video links, permitting computers to act as videophones or videoconference stations. This common use as a video camera...

. Located at San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...

.
HotWired

HotWired

Hotwired was the first commercial web magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of Wired Ventures, Hotwired was a separate entity from Wired, the print magazine, and had original content....

:Website of Wired magazine with its own unique and innovative online content. Home of the first banner ads, for Zima

Zima

Zima is a clear, lightly carbonated, alcoholic beverage, made and distributed by the Coors Brewing Company, ultimately MillerCoors. Introduced in 1993, it was marketed not as a beer, but as an alternative to beer, an early example of what is now often referred to as alcopop. Its domestic production...

 and AT&T

AT&T

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

.
Justin Hall

Justin Hall

Justin Hall , is an American freelance journalist who is best known as a pioneer blogger , and for writing reviews from game conferences such as E3 as well as the Tokyo Game Show....

's Links from the Underground: One of the earliest examples of personal weblogging.
Lawinfo

Lawinfo

LawInfo.com Incwas founded in 1994. It is an online directory of pre-qualified, pre-screened attorneys licensed in the United States. The website also contains over 100,000 free legal forms, 750 legal videos, and 24,000 frequently asked legal questions, a forum for asking legal questions and many...

:Early legal website, provides public access to pre-qualified, pre-screened attorneys, and to free legal resources.
Lycos

Lycos

Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...

:Early search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

, originally a university research project by Dr. Michael Mauldin

Michael Loren Mauldin

Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin is the founder and chief scientist of the Lycos Internet search engine company. He developed the Lycos Search Engine while working on the Informedia Digital Library project at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also, Director of Conversive, Inc...

.
Museum of Bad Art

Museum of Bad Art

The Museum of Bad Art is a privately owned museum whose stated aim is "to celebrate the labor of artists whose work would be displayed and appreciated in no other forum". It has two branches, one in Dedham, Massachusetts, and the other in nearby Somerville...

:Website of a museum "dedicated to the tongue-in-cheek

Tongue-in-cheek

Tongue-in-cheek is a phrase used as a figure of speech to imply that a statement or other production is humorously intended and it should not be taken at face value. The facial expression typically indicates that one is joking or making a mental effort. In the past, it may also have indicated...

 display of poorly conceived or executed examples of Outsider Art

Outsider Art

The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...

 in the form of paintings or sculpture."
The Nine Planets

The Nine Planets

The Nine Planets, a multimedia tour of the Solar System by Bill Arnett, was one of the first examples of multimedia websites. It first appeared on the World Wide Web in 1994 and, as was common for high traffic websites at the time, was widely mirrored...

: "A Multimedia Tour of the Solar System", created by Bill Arnett. One of the first extensively multimedia sites.
Nando.net

Nando

In the early 1990s, NandO or Nando.net was one of the first Internet newspaper sites.-Inception:Nando was produced by the New Media division of The News & Observer newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina...

: One of the first newspaper sites, the online presence of the Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer

The News & Observer

The News & Observer is the regional daily newspaper of the Research Triangle area of the U.S. State of North Carolina. The N&O, as it is popularly called, is based in Raleigh and also covers Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill. The paper also has substantial readership in most of the state east of...

.
Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut is an American restaurant chain and international franchise that offers different styles of pizza along with side dishes including pasta, buffalo wings, breadsticks, and garlic bread....

: The pizza

Pizza

Pizza is an oven-baked, flat, disc-shaped bread typically topped with a tomato sauce, cheese and various toppings.Originating in Italy, from the Neapolitan cuisine, the dish has become popular in many parts of the world. An establishment that makes and sells pizzas is called a "pizzeria"...

 delivery restaurant allows people in Santa Cruz, California

Santa Cruz, California

Santa Cruz is the county seat and largest city of Santa Cruz County, California in the US. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, Santa Cruz had a total population of 59,946...

 to order pizza over the Web.
Powells.com: The website of Powell's Books

Powell's Books

Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores in Oregon's Portland metropolitan area. Powell's headquarters, dubbed Powell's City of Books, claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's City of Books is located in the Pearl District on the edge of downtown and...

, which was originally at http://www.powells.portland.or.us/ and started with two employees; the company's first online order was placed by an Apple employee. It pre-dated Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

, which started as an online bookstore.
Sex.com

Sex.com

Sex.com is an Internet domain name and web portal currently owned by Clover Holdings LTD. The domain name was the focus of one of the most publicized legal actions about ownership of domain names...

: Subject of a twelve-year legal battle that established parameters of domain ownership.
Sighting.com: SIGHTINGS began in 1994 as the website home for Jeff Rense's award winning UFO & Paranormal radio program of the same name.
The Simpsons Archive

The Simpsons Archive

The Simpsons Archive, better known as snpp.com or simply SNPP , is a Simpsons fan site that has been online since 1994...

: The very first fan site for The Simpsons

The Simpsons

The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...

 television show.
SpinnWebe

SpinnWebe

SpinnWebe is the personal website of Greg Galcik, also known as "spinn." It gathered the most fame as the home of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, which ran in the late 1990s...

: Early humor site, called "a window on the weird" by The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

.
The WWW Useless Pages: Perhaps the first site which showcased bad or eccentric websites rather than 'cool' ones.
Whitehouse.gov

Whitehouse.gov

Whitehouse.gov is the official website of the White House and is owned by the United States government. Launched in October 1994, it contains general American history information, as well as current news pertaining to the President, press briefings, proclamations, executive orders, and any speeches...

: The official website of the White House

White House

The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

.
World-Wide Web Worm

World-Wide Web Worm

The World-Wide Web Worm was the first search engine for the World-Wide Web, being developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the University of Colorado. The worm created a database of 300000 multimedia objects which could be obtained or searched for keywords via the WWW. In contrast to...

: Another early web crawler, opened in October 1994.
Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

: Originally started as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web"; later Yahoo without the exclamation mark.
THE VOMITUS MAXIMUS MUSEUM: vomitus.com was established 12/12/1994 to showcase the early artwork of Robert Steven Connett