Hot tubs aren’t the only things that can double as time machines. Your computer can, too, with a bit of help. YouTube Time Machine is a website that allows you to pick a year, and watch video content from that year.
The site is pretty simple. A slider across the top allows you to pick a year (currently from 1860 through 2010). The content is pre-selected by the folks who run the site, and is fed to you randomly for the year that you select. You can filter content by type, allowing or disallowing certain categories of content. The current categories are Video Games, Television, Commercials, Current Events, Sports, Movies, and Music.
As an example of what you might get, when I selected 1986, I was presented with a video montage of television commercials that aired in 1986, the music video for Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On a Prayer, a trailer for Short Circuit 1, a montage of television show openings, and Marv Albert’s best sports bloopers of 1986.
The site isn’t perfect, but it is still in alpha status. Often, videos that I skipped kept returning as I skipped through content, and there is no way to list all of the selected videos for a year. Still, YouTube Time Machine offers a nice journey down memory lane. Does it bring back memories for you like it does for me?
Evan Kline says:
Wellllll . . . about 10 minutes before this post went live (I scheduled it yesterday), I saw Lifehacker covered the same thing. They might get just a few more eyeballs than this one does.
September 26, 2010 — 9:09 pm
John says:
AWESOME!!! Put the slider on 1975 and…man I feel old ; )
Thanks for sharing!
September 27, 2010 — 8:38 am
Evan Kline says:
I’m glad you liked it, John. I think I spent about an hour on Saturday hopping through the years.
September 27, 2010 — 9:23 am
Christie says:
Oh this is great! I’d already done my share of YouTube searching in the past so I could show my kids what “I Love Lucy” or “Flipper” looked like when they saw a reference to them on a newer show. But this site will even be wonderful to share with my mother, as she watches some things from the 1920s-50s!
September 27, 2010 — 1:12 pm
Evan Kline says:
That was what amazed me the most – the older stuff that is out there. My wife got a kick out of Edison’s boxing cats. Crazy stuff.
September 27, 2010 — 1:32 pm