One of their technical advisers explained that because the “original internet, the ARPANET, was never designed to grow and expand the way it did,” says Johnston, the internet has evolved like “a city that’s built on top of itself, like Rome or Istanbul, where you have the ancient city deep underground and you have the newer city on top of that and on top of that. So in conceiving our visual design, we built it with these older websites at the bottom, which we think of as the Oldernet. You might have Netscape Navigator, that kind of thing. Then as you go up more and more, you start to see a modern city like Tokyo or New York or whatever.”
Source: latimes.com – Los Angeles Times