Wow that feels so weird seeing spammy headlines with a minimalist layout and knowing it's not broken.

I was surprised not to see the old interactive Flash ads like "Swat the fly for a better insurance rate!"

They actually took the time to make it at "template" of sorts.

I wonder if the sites are deliberately made using an older design language to appeal to a certain audience?

You almost want to clone it and just replace the content with something more interesting.

Actually, the Netscape page is just a thin veneer over the CompuServe page. If you take the green gifs off, the page is filled with CompuServe colors. It's less a template and more Netscape wearing the skin of CompuServe turned green.

I prefer to think there's some developer out there who wrote wonderful code to made that "Homepage" performant and easy to maintain, and has successfully argued for their continued existence, occasionally pushing out a small feature addition to feed in data from new sources as old sources go.