The Indie Web
5.21.2020 nostalgia

These web desktops are a true nostalgia bomb.

A blast from the past

Simone’s Web Desktops is a huge wonderfully well-curated collection of web-based desktop experiences for your delighted and complete nostalgia.

The showcased website’s aesthetics are ranging all the way back to the Windows 93 era (and before) right through to the 2000s. There’s also some great vaporwave experiences, that really capture the mood just right.

Truly most of these sites could have their own writeups, as they’re all beautifully unique and well crafted but in the interest of playing favorites, here is a couple that I completely adore.

JSPaint perfectly recreates the MS paint experience I had as a kid, right down to the perfect the star tool, allowing me to re-live my abstract arty past.

PoolSide.FM is a whole vaporwave aesthetic experience on its own, complete with the nineties’est of nineties videos, quirky apps, and all the windows background defaults I’d forever forgotten about.

And I couldn’t end the article without mentioning The Restart Page which presents you with the shutdown dialogs for basically every computer you could have owned and then will allow you to hit restart and experience that reboot in all its beeping text flashing glory.

The site creator, Simone Marzulli (who also has a wonderful web desktop inspired homepage!) has open-sourced the collections code on GitHub, allowing you to contribute your own creations or any others you may come across!

Simone’s Web Desktops