About

A time machine, not a timeline

The Internet From 2010 is an interactive museum. Pick a year, and the site reconstructs how the internet felt: the sites, the sounds, the speeds, the slang.

Wikipedia can tell you that Instagram launched on 6 October 2010. It cannot make you feel what it was like to open a Windows 7 laptop, wait a minute for the desktop, sign in to Messenger, and watch a 360p video buffer over café Wi-Fi. This project tries to do that second thing without inventing anything.

Why 2010? It was the hinge between the desktop web and the mobile web. Flash still ran the video players and games, but the iPad and iPhone 4 refused to run it. Facebook crossed 500 million users. Twitter became the newswire. Digg collapsed, Reddit rose, Tumblr exploded. LimeWire died in a courtroom while Spotify waited in Europe. Almost everything that defines the internet today either arrived or tipped over that year.

How it is built

Next.js and React, with Tailwind for the styling and the period fonts (Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia, Lucida) served straight from the visitor's system, plus two web fonts.
A MySQL/MariaDB database managed with Drizzle ORM, seeded from structured, source-linked data files. If the database is down, the built-in dataset takes over.
Full-text search in the database, with an in-memory fallback.
The Wayback Machine for archived pages, cached and optional.
An admin area for editing entries, events, sources and categories, protected by a password and signed sessions.
Unit, API and end-to-end tests, and a link checker for every source.

What is real and what is not

Every historical entry and event carries a confidence label and links to its sources.
Interfaces are original recreations of layout, colour and feel. They are not screenshots and reproduce no logos.
The 2010 search page searches the exhibit, not a copy of Google's 2010 index, and says so.
The day-in-2010 story, the speed simulator, the chat and download scenes and the game are simulations.
Company and product names are used to describe history. No affiliation is claimed with any of them.
The code is open source under the MIT License, and the exhibit's own text, data and artwork are CC BY 4.0. The logo and poster are reserved.

Run it yourself

The project ships with a README covering setup, database creation, seeding, tests and deployment. In short:

cp .env.example .env.local   # set DATABASE_URL (MySQL/MariaDB)
pnpm install
pnpm db:setup                # create database, run migrations, seed 2010
pnpm dev                     # http://localhost:3000

Enter the time machine·Sources and method

Run it yourself

The project ships with a README covering setup, database creation, seeding, tests and deployment. In short:

cp .env.example .env.local # set DATABASE_URL (MySQL/MariaDB) pnpm install pnpm db:setup # create database, run migrations, seed 2010 pnpm dev # http://localhost:3000