You know what they say — you can’t keep a good website down. OldVersion.com, the repository of outdated software that has been serving up old versions of tools you need for the last twenty-five years, is not going away as we reported last year. Not only is it sticking around, it’s gotten a retro facelift inspired by Windows 3.1 or OS/2. Mostly Windows, given the screensaver, but we’ll let you find that for yourself.
We’re thrilled to see that OldVersion has gotten the support they need to keep going after running into financial troubles. According to founder Alex Levine, some of that support came as a result of the Hackaday article reporting on the then-upcoming closure, so kudos to you guys for stepping up.
While we absolutely love the retro redesign of the new website, that’s one thing notably lacking — an obvious donation button. Well, that and old-school HTTP support so you can get on with your retromachines, but that, at least, is in the works according to the site roadmap. It’s a little weird that in this year of the common era 2026 you have to do extra work to give up on HTTPS functionality, but it is the way it is.
In the meantime, the site is fully usable as long as you have HTTPS capability, or go through a proxy. Perhaps you could use this ESP8266 code to get started making one, if you don’t want to embarrass your old computer by using something more powerful than it as a pass-through.
Speaking of proxies, if old versions of software aren’t enough for you, how about an old version of the internet? We heard you like old versions, so you can visit an old version of OldVersion!
Note that if you’re reading this after 01/04/2026, the look-and-feel of OldVersion.com may not match what’s depicted here.
Perhaps serving HTTP on an alternate port like 8080 could be a way to offer it without alerting the various tech megacorps’ security drones? It may require a separate HTTP server process though…or at least that might be an easier way of doing it.
Hi! I’m Chad and I work with Alex to rebuild and maintain the site. Thanks for the suggestion. HTTP (non-SSL) support is on our roadmap (https://www.oldversion.com/roadmap/) and targeted for later this month. It will be hosted on a subdomain legacy.oldversion.com and have certain features disabled for security. My goal is to support at least as far back as IE6. Hold tight, it’s coming soon.
The site is looking very nice, Win 3.1 GUI is a gold standard for me. Not the first but certainly modernized the OS experience for people like me.
i still use http when communicating with my fleet of ESP8266s (no reason to replace and better energy use characteristics than an esp32 when not going into sleep modes — ideal for an offgrid cabin) — i even wrote my own encryption layer so anyone intercepting my plaintext http traffic cannot make use of or spoof it. much less overhead than https and fewer dependency turtle stacks