The World Wide Web turns 30: our favorite memories from A to Z theverge.com/2019/3/12/1825…

Amazon: what began as an online bookstore rapidly expanded, and soon consumed, many of the brick-and-mortar brands we knew and loved. These days, using Amazon is kind of unavoidable.

BuzzFeed: one of the defining voices of early digital media was good at what it set out to do: make viral content. Its irreverent voice set off a wave of copycat sites, enough to create an entire industry of online media for millennials begging to be parodied.

CSS: it made it easier to learn how to make pretty and usable webpages. You could use a browser to inspect a site’s code and start messing around with the whole page, changing everything with just a little tweak.

Dril: one of the wonders of Weird Twitter, Dril has played an important role in defining what it means to be Online, fathering classics like “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob”

eBbay: few online marketplaces are just as likely to sell you aftermarket car parts as they are second-hand clothes, and yet, somehow, eBay finds a place for all of them.

Flickr: a digital gallery, an online photography museum for pros and amateurs alike. It seems to be shrinking these days, but it will always loom large in influence.

Close your eyes, and imagine your dream GeoCities page. While you’re deciding, though, maybe put up a GIF of a construction worker with a hard hat and an “under construction” sign so that visitors will know you have something good coming.

Hotmail: It launched as one of the first webmail sites that anyone could sign up to use as an alternative to their ISP’s offering. The early web was so geeky that Hotmail’s founders chose the name because it included reference to HTML (“HoTMaiL”).

Internet Archive: there’s no better place to see what the web was like — and expose things long thought forgotten — than the 349 billion webpages stored in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Jennicam: Jennifer Ringley was one of the first people to share her life online without a filter, offering a sense of intimacy and relatability that we now take for granted with digital celebrities.

Know Your Meme: the internet is a never-ending sprawl of extremely good memes, constantly mutating, remixing, and changing. Know Your Meme chronicles and makes order out of that chaos.

LiveJournal: once upon a time there was a social network called LiveJournal where large numbers of people (some with very confusing pseudonyms) hung out, blogged, argued in long comment threads, posted fiction and poetry and art, and had a generally good time.

My Immortal: did a teen named Tara Gilesbie write a malapropism-filled Harry Potter fan story about a mall goth vampire witch named “Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way?” Was Tara herself a fictional creation? Or was My Immortal an earnest project that descended into trolling?

Netflix: it managed to rapidly transform from a DVD rental service to a full-on digital streaming service that thoroughly redefined how and where we watch movies and TV.

OkCupid: something about OkCupid’s quirky approach made the site and its users feel like they were in on some sort of joke about the inherent awkwardness of getting to know a stranger.

Pornhub: yes, there are cultural downsides to so much porn being freely available, but Pornhub has also encouraged people to let their freak flags fly. What started as a place to view dirty pics is now one of the web’s most visited sites.

QWOP: It may not have been the most fun Flash game, but it was one of the few that allowed you to truly feel something beyond the mash of a button.

Reddit: the self-described “front page of the internet” is also the place people go to unwind, discover curiosities, and find like minds.

Strong Bad: the beauty of Strong Bad is that you don’t need to know a thing. The humor is self-explanatory: a cartoon antihero in a Lucha Libre mask sardonically answers his fan mail in the lowest-fi text interface imaginable.

Tim Berners-Lee: when he came up with what he thought would be a global system for knowledge and data sharing among research institutions three decades ago, it wasn’t called the World Wide Web; it was just “Mesh.”

URL: like most things related to the web, the URL was never designed for the eventual ubiquity it achieved.

vBulletin: it wasn’t the first or the only software to run web forums, but it was a favorite. Even in the age of Facebook, forums are still an essential strata of the web.

Wikipedia: you could just call Wikipedia “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” but that’s underselling its impact. Wikipedia is a living reflection of modern culture.

XKCD: Faceless stick figures make it easy to project ourselves in the comics, whether they’re single panels or behemoth undertakings that take you through a click-and-drag adventure.

Yahoo: Search engines built the web, and Yahoo was one of the first, biggest, and longest to survive. Yahoo became the web’s homepage for many, delivering news, markets, sports, and more, and putting a link to your Yahoo mailbox on the same page.

Zombo: this is ZomboCom. Welcome. This is ZomboCom. Welcome to ZomboCom. You can do anything at ZomboCom. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself. Welcome to ZomboCom.