A solo-built retro internet museum with a clear niche
oldwebdiary.com is a digital museum about early internet culture. Its interface is designed to look like Windows 95, Windows XP, and Mac OS 9, and changing the theme updates the windows, taskbar, fonts, buttons, and desktop wallpaper. It includes more than 50 internet memes, including Dancing Baby, Hamster Dance, Rickroll, and Doge, with stories for each one.
It also has a daily internet history section, a vault for nearly lost Flash and old websites, a memory wall where people can share early internet memories, and a library of downloadable Windows 95 sounds, cursors, wallpapers, and fonts. The site was built solo in about four weeks during evenings and weekends. The tools used include Next.js 16, TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma, Supabase, Tailwind v4, , and Vercel.
The hardest technical problems were stopping the wrong theme from briefly appearing during page load and making Vercel images render meme images reliably; the fixes involved cookie-based and avoiding .webp images for that edge image setup.
Key points
- The site packages early internet culture as an interactive retro desktop-style museum.
- It includes meme histories, daily internet history, lost media, user memories, and downloadable retro assets.
- It was built solo in about four weeks during evenings and weekends.
- The project shows how a strong niche and visual style can make a small web product stand out.
- No revenue, traffic, or growth results are included yet.