“Was the internet really this bad?” I wondered to myself as I read the September 1995 issue of The Atlantic. I was reading the issue in digital form, displayed on Netscape Navigator 3 on a mid-’90s Macintosh. Or, at least, on a software version of the browser and Mac provided on the website OldWeb.Today. The site houses an emulator that connects to the Internet Archive’s record of websites, providing a full computing experience of the World Wide Web of three decades ago. That experience was the badness I was pondering. Not the magazine itself—which began publishing online with this issue, whose cover story asked “How Lincoln Might Have Dealt With Abortion”—but the way I was reading it. The article page looked awful: The nameplate was strangely positioned, and the text was hard to read. Resizing the browser window fixed the layout, but my eyes and brain still struggled to process the words. I was alive and online that fall 29 years ago, but in my memory the web was magical, like a portal into a …