1997 / Web post / Personal-homepage classic
Hampster Dance
A page full of bouncing hamsters and a sped-up earworm: that was enough.
The original is off-site. HAHrchives preserves the story and a route back to it.
What happened
Rows of tiny animated hamsters bounced along to a relentlessly cheerful loop. The site did not need a premise beyond “here are the hamsters again,” which was exactly why people kept sending it to each other.
Where it came from
Deidre LaCarte made the site after a friendly 1997 contest to see whose web page could attract the most visitors. She built it around her pet hamster, Hampton.
Why it mattered
Hampster Dance preserves the feel of the personal-homepage web: homemade, loud, lightly illegal-looking, and built for the joy of making someone else’s browser do something ridiculous.
How it spread
The page spread through links, email, and copycat sites. By 1999, contemporaneous reporting described millions of visits and hundreds of imitation pages, all built from a remarkably simple mechanism.
Keep going
