Summary
- Opera’s Web Rewind: an interactive, nostalgic playground of the internet’s baby photos.
- Tell your favorite web memory in ≤500 chars (pics/video
- Three winners win a trip to CERN to visit the Web’s birthplace and LHC before June 30, 2026.
The speed of the internet feels like a double-edged sword. On one hand, you’re never more than a week away from the newest trend, meme, or in-joke to hit the internet; on the other, things get buried so quickly that you don’t have much time to savor things before they’re already passe.
So, how about going back in time and checking out how things were in the early days? Well, Opera is celebrating its birthday the best way that it knows how: by showing everyone the internet’s baby photos and cooing over them. Remember when Grumpy Cat was a thing? Well, you’re about to.
Opera Project Rewind is here to remind you how old your favorite memes are
‘All Your Base’ is still hip, right?
To celebrate its 30th birthday, Opera has released Web Rewind. It’s an interactive look through how the internet evolved and developed over time, including those glorious golden years where the ‘You’ve got mail’ AOL guy was relevant. Opera insists that, while it’s a curated collection of stuff from over the last three decades of the internet, you should treat it less like a museum and more like a playground where you can mess around and play with things. So, basically, a museum if the curators weren’t cowards about me putting on the medieval armor.
However, that’s not all. Opera is also holding a small competition where you can share your fave internet memory:
To mark the big 3-0, we’re hunting for the best web memories that actually stuck. We’re encouraging everyone to reflect for a second and submit their own “Web Rewind” moments – whether it’s a life-changing online interaction, a nostalgic gaming site, or a piece of internet folklore that defined your experience online.
The authors of the three best entries will win a trip to the birthplace of it all: CERN in Switzerland. This is where the World Wide Web was born in the early 90s. Winners will get the rare chance to visit the home of the Large Hadron Collider and stand where Sir Tim Berners-Lee first revolutionized how we share information.
All you have to do to compete is to visit the website, hit the “Submit” button, and then tell your story using up to 500 characters. If you still have a video or a picture from your story, you can upload it too, as long as it’s below 10 MB. You’ve got until March 27th, 2026, and the winners will get to visit before June 30th, 2026. Good luck!
