Deep down, in my heart, I truly miss the days of the old web. I became a tween in around the turn of the millenium, so I got to see it all online: it moved from a wild west frontier to a settled modern city, and do I ever wish I could go back... I remember editing my mostly-unformatted webpages to try to get tables inserted, to fill them out with information and somehow upload them to the free hosting services at the time. The clunky UI interface still sticks with me, no drag and drop anything.
I have recently been afflicted with the hobby of scrolling old web archives for interesting things. Sometimes I find highly inappropriate things, sometimes it's just random photos from family albums. Every so often, I find gifs, blinkies, backgrounds and other graphical gifts from the deep, old web. I want to save them so they are archived at least somewhere before they are lost forever. For instance, the background of my main blog is a cherry gif from the early 2000s, pulled from Web Archive - Geocities. Every so often it goes down, but I have a backup copy here as well. I feel like it is important to preserve this old data, since so much was lost to the Great Geocities Fire, it's hard to imagine just how many individual thoughts and graphics were lost.
Web Archive
It's hard to break it down, really, but I will try my best:
Graphics - Backgrounds, headers, footers, and blinkies! Everything is hosted here, but please download them and upload them to your own website! The more copies exist the better, you never know if you're archiving something that will one day be lost media!
Out-Of-Context - Trust me, they're either awkward or weird, 100% vintage, pulled from geocities listings and archives. I have been flashed more than a few times, and I don't mean the browser software, but I have omitted anything inappropriate from this gallery.
Examples - What I remember to be contemporary to the time, as well as my own historic examples of graphic design.