Our Website Is 30 Years Old!
The first visit to our site was on December 15, 1993.
Leading the Way on the Web
The Exploratorium was one of the first few museums to build a site on the World Wide Web. When www.exploratorium.edu launched in 1993, there were only about 600 other websites online. Site founder Ron Hipschman persuaded the registrar to let us use the .edu suffix, which is typically used only for schools, colleges, and universities.
Today, our site serves 13 million visitors each year. We’ve received six Webby Awards since 1997, including four for Best Science Website and one for Best Education website, and we’ve been an honoree ten additional times. We’ve come a long way!
Looking at this screenshot of our site from April 1994, you can see how much has changed about the web and web design. What do you notice about this website? What immediately dates it?
"When we launched our website, we could see about 600 others. The only other museum sites were the UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology, and an online exhibit at the Library of Congress about the Vatican Library. That was it."
–Rob Semper, Exploratorium
When the Web Was Young
The Internet as Exhibit
It’s hard to imagine today, but in the early 1990s most households were not connected to the Internet and didn’t own a computer. The Exploratorium saw the public need to understand and experience the Internet and other multimedia tools. We developed the Multimedia Playground exhibition “to offer visitors direct personal experience with emerging digital technologies." It debuted in 1994, and an expanded, updated opened in 1995.
View the 1995 Multimedia Playground Website and learn about the exhibition below.
Internet Roundtable
Internet Roundtable offered public access to the Internet. Exploratorium staff helped visitors find their way around the web, and offered advice to those interested in hooking up their own computers.
CU-SeeMe
CU-SeeMe was a real-time, multi-party video teleconferencing system developed in 1992 at Cornell University. It was one of the first videoconferencing systems for the personal computer.
Digital Snackbar
The Digital Snackbar offered a selection of over 50 commercially available CD-ROMs, a CD used to store computer software. These CD-ROMs were produced by museums, schools, and community groups.
The Snackbar also included a beginner's area where visitors could learn the basics of computer operation, participate in regularly scheduled computer dissections, and look closely at the individual components of a running computer.
CitySpace
CitySpace was a virtual city environment built collaboratively by kids, educators, and media artists across the Internet. The project invited young people to share stories, pictures, sounds, and 3D models of their own creation, and to assemble them into a navigable, three-dimensional city model.
CitySpace at Multimedia Playground '95 was the first-ever internationally networked virtual environment, linking visitors at the Exploratorium and the Ontario Science Center in Toronto.
Visit the CitySpace Website
Ahead of Our Time
In addition to developing one of the first 1,000 websites on the Internet, the Exploratorium has a long history of experimenting with cutting-edge technologies. Some of our early experiments look a lot like the technologies we use today.
What do these remind you of?
"There is a pervasive sense that we are at the threshold of an electronic revolution that will transform almost everything that we do."
–History of the Future Series, Multimedia Playground, 1995
30+ Years of Explo Web Projects
The Exploratorium has built dozens of websites that explore science, art, and human perception through interactive experiences. Many of our early projects were funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies.
These sites may feel dated today, but notice how many of their features still work. How do they differ from websites today?
Please note, some of these websites require Flash, which you can view by adding the following extension to your browser.
Classic Interactives
Please note, some of these websites require Flash, which you can view by adding the following extension to your browser.
Our Website Through the Years
Over the years, our website has continuously evolved through many changes in both web technology and web design. Check out some snapshots of our site, and relive 30 years of Exploratorium online history.
Click the images to enlarge.
1993
- www.exploratorium.edu launches
- Written in HTML+, which was released earlier that year
- Designed for the Mosaic web browser, the first to support the integration of text and graphics.
1995–2000
- Began using column layouts and menu bars
- Added a search engine using Perl CGI (along with a lesson in using boolean operators)
- Added online shopping
- Added webcasts—The Exploratorium was an early adopter of Internet broadcasting
- Won the Webby Award for Best Science Website three years in a row (1997–1999)
- The Science of Hockey website was nominated for Best Sports Site in 1998
2000–2010
- Added newsletter sign-ups
- Added our first Privacy Policy—only two short paragraphs!
- Started using Javascript (created in 1995), to make our site more interactive
- Became a gateway for our global initiatives, launching projects such as:
- Ice Stories, broadcasting online from the poles;
- Neverlost, the first website on Polynesian navigation in the Hawaiian language;
- Award-winning Solar Eclipse broadcast live from China
2010–2013
- Launched two iPad apps, Color Uncovered and Sound Uncovered
- Color Uncovered premiered at #1 in Educational apps and was among the top 10 apps overall (beating out Angry Birds)
- Won awards for the Return to Mars website, and the Science in the City video series
- Migrated the website from hard-coded pages to the Drupal content management system
2013–2016
- Redesigned site to support the Exploratorium’s move to Pier 15
- Added Instagram feeds to the home page
- Won more Solar Eclipse awards
2016–2023
- Solar Eclipse broadcasts from Micronesia, U.S., and Chile reached more than 70 million viewers worldwide (Webby Award winner)
- Solar Eclipse app downloaded more than 500,000 times (Webby Award winner)
- Restored the Never Lost website, originally made in Flash
- Migrated site from Drupal v7 to v10.
About the Original Creator
Ron Hipschman has worn many hats since he joined the Exploratorium in 1971, including exhibit developer and author of two of our three Cookbooks—printed manuals for building Exploratorium exhibits. In 1991, as the Exploratorium's one-man IT department, Ron established the museum’s presence on the Internet, and in 1993 put us on the World Wide Web, making our web site among the first 600 in the world (and the first web presence for a science museum). In 1996, Ron spearheaded the museum’s experiments with webcasting, and has since contributed technical expertise and hosted countless programs, including the popular series Full-Spectrum Science and Tales from The Periodic Table, which he continues to produce on his Youtube channel. Ron is currently responsible for maintaining our Wired Pier meteorological instruments, and the visualizations for our media wall in the Fisher Bay Observatory Gallery.
Check out Ron's original websites:
