The internet has changed so much since its early days and since our own first experiences with it that it is easy to focus only on what we have now, even though we can probably still remember perfectly well that ordinary afternoon when, sitting in front of the family computer, we waited for the connection to go through its ritual while the screen seemed to be getting ready to open a new door.
A moment that held something of a promise, of discovery, and of giving us access to a truly vast world. A few years ago, the internet still felt like a place waiting to be explored, where ingenuity thrived and innocence had its place, and that was a big part of its magic. Now, those memories come with a prize, thanks to Opera.
The prize? A trip to Switzerland
Through its Web Rewind project, Opera goes beyond telling a story. It wants us to tell our part of the story. That is exactly why sharing the web we remember comes with a reward: the authors of the three best entries will win a trip to CERN in Switzerland, the birthplace of the World Wide Web. It is a very fitting destination to complete the circle of the journey, from that first connection we still remember to the exact place where that connection first began to take shape.
The competition is open right now and will close on March 27, 2026. Taking part is very simple: we visit www.web-rewind.com and submit our memory directly on the site.
When going online was like opening a huge window
Today we browse at a simply astonishing speed, with platforms that are as much a part of our daily lives as the newspaper on the kitchen table was a few years ago. Browsing back then felt very different: slower, more manual, more reflective, and also more ours. Watching a website load, discovering a forum where people were talking about our favourite comic, or finding a page with colours that were almost impossible to read and a design that was nothing short of bizarre was part of a kind of browsing that felt almost tactile, as if every click carried its own weight.
There was a mix of curiosity and wonder. We went online eager to see what might appear on the other side. We could start out looking for one thing and end up reading about something completely different, saving a site to our favourites and thinking we would come back the next day. The web back then gave us a feeling of constant discovery, and we moved through it, we browsed it, following a path we traced ourselves, as if we were drawing our own map inside something immense.
Shiny buttons, visitor counters, exaggerated fonts and animated GIFs everywhere were the norm. Seen today, that web had a handmade charm that still feels surprisingly appealing. Everything seemed to be made by people who wanted to show something to the world. And that sense of closeness turned every corner of the internet into a space with a certain personal connection, because behind many pages you could make out the person behind them.
We opened one page after another simply for the pleasure of doing so, we read for hours, and we felt that, somehow, that screen was showing us a new way of looking at the world. A window had opened on a computer whose limits we already knew and, through it, we were seeing something completely different.
That feeling is exactly what Web Rewind captures with surprising mastery. The project presented by Opera to celebrate 30 years of web history starts from a very simple and very accurate idea: turning our own memories into something alive, a place where we can travel through three decades of the internet while, at the same time, making that journey our own by remembering how we ourselves used it.
The web has grown, it has changed scale, and it has completely transformed the way we learn, speak and discover. Even so, one feeling remains untouched by the passing of time: that of going in and feeling that something enormous has just opened up before us.
