Happy 30th birthday, internet. Here is 21 years of The World’s website.

March 12, 2019

By The World staff

A collage of five screen grabs of The World's website since 1998. — Images of The World’s homepage over the years.

Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web on March 11, 1989. Now, the internet and the web mean virtually the same thing and the world is connected in a way no one foresaw three decades ago.

In honor of the annivesary, we thought we’d take a nostalgic trip of our own and look at The World’s many iterations on the information superhighway.

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The World’s website is as old as the show itself, which launched in 1996. Back in the 1990s, an on-air promo for the website said that there are plenty of stops on the information superhighway, but that if you’re looking for news and features about the whole world, theworld.org was your destination. (You can play the audio file above to hear it.)

That’s quite a mandate for a website that — at first — took three days to update.

Jonathan Dyer, now The World’s managing editor, would select three stories from the show and send them to PRI’s headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the website was managed at the time.

It was a website designed for the audience to be able to come back and listen to the show or individual stories.

Take a closer look at these homepages, archived on Wayback Machine.