The decade did not get deleted — it got scattered. An arcade cabinet ended up in an Internet Archive collection, a GeoCities page ended up in a mirror in Europe, and Windows 98 ended up compiled to WebAssembly by somebody who thought it would be funny. The Past Machine is the index that puts them back in one desktop.
Five folders, sixty-odd destinations, all of them checked and all of them free to open. Nothing here is hosted on this site and nothing needs an account: click an icon, pick a thing, and you are in 1996 inside a browser tab.
Nothing dates a decade like its games. The arcade cabinet you fed quarters to, the cartridge you blew into, the shareware episode that came on a floppy from a magazine cover — nearly all of it now runs inside a browser tab, emulated in JavaScript and WebAssembly, at the same frame rate it ran at then.
The old web is not gone; it is just no longer indexed. Between the Internet Archive's crawls, a handful of mirroring projects and the people who simply never took their pages down, a surprising amount of the 1990s is still reachable — provided you know the address or the archive that holds it.
An emulator that runs a whole operating system in a browser sounds like it should not work, and for a long time it did not. Then x86 emulators were compiled to WebAssembly, and now a 1995 desktop boots in about the time it takes a modern web app to load its fonts.
Emulating a whole operating system to open Paint is a lot of work for one program. So a handful of developers did the other thing: they rebuilt the individual applications in JavaScript, feature for feature, down to the menu order and the keyboard shortcuts.
Visual nostalgia is easy to find and easy to fake. Sound is harder, and it is what actually triggers the memory — a modem handshake, a station ident, the specific compression of a cassette dub.
Link rot is the whole problem with nostalgia sites: half of them are directories of things that stopped existing years ago. Every destination on this site was loaded and checked before it was listed, and the ones that are gone — and there were several — were left off rather than listed with an apology. If something here has since died, it will come off the same way.