Tag: advertising

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Ancient Web: 75 Years of Band-Aid Started With a Garage Full of Old Boxes

Somebody moved into an old Northern California house, found roughly two dozen old Band-Aid boxes in the garage, and did the most correct possible 1995 thing with them: made a web page.

Visit 75 Years of Band-Aid

The page explains that the house had belonged to a family that apparently hated throwing useful containers away. Nails, washers, bolts, and other small hardware had been stored in Band-Aid boxes dating back to roughly the 1950s.

Instead of tossing the boxes, the site’s author photographed them and put them online.

That small decision turned into a surprisingly good piece of consumer-history preservation.

The page notes that it quietly reached its tenth birthday around February 2005, putting its origin around 1995. In 1996, after the page had been online about a year, a Johnson & Johnson manufacturing manager found it and sent historical details about Band-Aid production, including the North Brunswick, New Jersey plant and the brand’s earlier manufacturing history.

Then readers started adding to it

The collection did not stay limited to the boxes from the garage.

Readers submitted additional packaging, a 1946 family photograph showing a Band-Aid being applied to a child, and material connected to Doctor Dan The Bandage Man, an old Little Golden Book sold with Band-Aids.

In 2008, a relative of Josephine Knight Dickson — the wife of Band-Aid inventor Earle Dickson — even wrote in to object gently to the standard story that her clumsiness had inspired the invention. The page preserves that correction too.

There are also two old black-and-white television commercials, slogans from historical packaging, and photographs of boxes with prices in the 47-to-59-cent range. The author points out something easy to miss until it is stated directly: the older boxes do not have UPC symbols.

This is exactly the kind of history the early personal Web was good at collecting.

Nobody needed to establish the International Museum of Adhesive Bandage Packaging. Somebody found a weird pile of old boxes, cared enough to scan them, and left the page online long enough for other people to add context.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes pages like this because mundane objects become historical objects if they survive long enough with their context attached.

Apparently a garage full of old hardware storage containers was enough.

Explore the old Band-Aid packaging page

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Ancient Web: The Million Dollar Homepage Froze a Million Pixels in 2005

The Million Dollar Homepage is one of the rare websites whose entire business model can still be understood by looking at it for about five seconds: one million pixels, sold as advertising, until there were none left.

Visit The Million Dollar Homepage

Alex Tew launched the site in August 2005 while preparing for university. The page was a 1,000-by-1,000 pixel grid. Advertising space cost one dollar per pixel, although buyers had to purchase at least a 10-by-10 block, making the practical minimum $100.

Each buyer supplied a tiny image, a destination URL, and hover text.

That was it.

No recommendation engine. No audience targeting. No dashboard full of conversion funnels. Buy a visible square on the weird page everyone is talking about and hope people click it.

The last 1,000 pixels were auctioned in January 2006. The final reported gross passed the original million-dollar target, reaching $1,037,100.

A website that became the artifact

The interesting part in 2026 is that the homepage itself is now more valuable as a historical object than most of the advertisements ever were.

The grid is a compressed commercial cross-section of the mid-2000s Web. There are tiny company logos, gambling sites, novelty businesses, personal projects, services that vanished, and links pointing into twenty years of accumulated link rot.

Some destinations still work. Many do not.

The pixels remain anyway.

That makes the page strange in a way a screenshot would not be. It is still an actual web document with actual links embedded in the original idea. You can move around the mosaic and find surviving businesses beside dead domains, redirects, abandoned brands, and things that now require their own archaeological expedition.

The site also demonstrates how little technology an Internet phenomenon actually needs. The concept was visual, finite, easy to explain, and visible while it filled up. Every sale altered the public object, and the remaining empty space showed exactly how much of the experiment was left.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes surviving web artifacts like this because an old page can become more informative as the links around it decay.

The Million Dollar Homepage began as an ad board.

Now it is also a map of what survived badly.

Explore the original pixel grid