That's pretty cool. Yahoo! may have evolved into a completely bloated clusterfuck of a portal with way too many features and extra junk, but I'll always remember it fondly as one of the first pages I'd ever loaded. However, I may be remembering that incorrectly.

I do remember loading it regularly back before Netscape was available, before ever seeing any ads on the net, and when Yahoo! was still simply an index - no mail, no search, no instant news or stock quotes. There's a good chance it still may have been in that Stanford closet. And I remember that index as still being something manageable. Like you could read the whole text of thing in much less than a day if you didn't bother to actually load any links.

It's funny but I never did like yahoo. Everyone plain lurved it but I found their (waybackwhen) selling point of indexed pages in categories where human eyes had checked it out to be lacking. And the default grey was just fugly.

Big buttons. biiig butttonnnss!!!

I'm talking about Yahoo! from a wide eyed and innocent (back then) standpoint of there wasn't anything else available like it. There weren't any search engines. Sure, there was gopher, archie, and veronica, but those weren't web, and the web was growing like crazy and your choice for that brief period of time either yahoo or one of those early internet yellowpages books or listings. Excite and AltaVista weren't even ideas yet, and you couldn't get to the net from AOL at all.

It just boggles my head that it wasn't that long ago where you could actually publish a book with a vast majority of the known and at least partially useful URLs on the internet in it. Now there's simply not enough paper and trees in the world to even begin publishing a complete index.

(To be clearer, I'm talking about Yahoo! 3-4 years prior to this internet archive wayback machine link, which is the oldest it has.)

I still have an excite mail account that I check regularly. The shame of it all...