Tour Prince’s Colorful Internet Presence in Online Museum
Prince‘s colorful and often pioneering internet presence has faithfully been archived in the new Prince Online Museum, a website dedicated to documenting the late icon’s many personas and hubs online.
The site, which launched Monday, offers up a glimpse at all of Prince‘s sites, from his first online with the interactive TheDawn.com to his last bastion, 3rdEyeGirl.com. In between, there are album-specific sites like 3121.com and Lotusflow3r, New Power Generation-era hubs, online retail shops like Crystal Ball and 1-800-NEW-FUNK and short-lived official sites like Love 4 One Another and 20Pr1nc3.
Each stop on the Online Museum offers a detailed history and Prince’s mission for the site. Visitors can also tour an archived version of all of the sites with the exception of TheDawn.com, Prince’s first official site in 1996 that has since been erased from the internet but lives on in screengrabbed form at the Prince Online Museum.
“The Prince Online Museum was built by the people who worked directly with Prince on these projects,” the museum’s director Sam Jennings wrote in a statement on the site. “We are the originators, we are the experts. It is a labor of love, no money has been exchanged. There will be no downloads sold and no membership fees required. But we do have working versions of almost all of Prince’s official websites. Take a virtual walk through the timeline and remember when anything was possible.”
Watch Prince tributes at the BET Awards.