Of all the new things technology allows us to do, it’s funny how much we use it to recall our favorite memories of days gone by. Whether we’re pulling up the lyrics to Bell Biv Devoe, taking a quiz to find out which Muppet we are, or tracing our family tree, the Internet has made nostalgia a communal experience. Check out the best ways to create your own digital time machine:

1. Pull up old-school music videos. Back in the day, watching a music video meant sitting through hours of House of Style and The Real World (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Now, if you want to home-karaoke Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” or re-memorize the Madonna “Vogue” dance you knew by heart in 1990, you’ll be set after just a few searches on Vevo. We won’t tell—but the YouTube views don’t lie!

2. Take a look, it’s in a book. (No, really.) If anything proves the value of nostalgia online, it’s the phenomenal success of Reading Rainbow‘s Kickstarter campaign. The classic kids’ show’s perfect fundraising storm capitalized on the passion of new parents who grew up with the show and wanted to pass that love on to their children. So far, the project has raised more than five times its original goal of $1 million and will fund a new mobile app and free resources for schools to carry the educational program.

3. Search the Wayback Machine. Curious what Yahoo! looked like in 2000? Or want to remember how The New York Times covered the great NYC blackout of 2003? A simple search through the Internet archive can take you back to almost any point in time with a screen capture of specific dates and sites.

4. Three letters: #TBT. The origins of #TBT, or #throwbackthursday, are murky—some attribute it to a single Instagram user, @bobbysanders22, who posted the tag back in 2011. But regardless of where the trend started, scores of Instagrammers and Facebookers are using the weekly hashtag to share baby photos, old vacation stories, Halloween costumes of yore, and everything in between.

5. Find vintage clothes. There’s nothing more satisfying than scoring a crazy bargain. While scouring the best thrift shops in town was our M.O. at one time, it’s now a lot more fun to browse gently worn Louboutins on The Real Real.

6. Make new photos look old. Just because you were in Prague last week doesn’t mean your photo can’t look like you took a steamship there at the turn of the century. Using filters on photo-sharing apps like Instagram, Hipstamatic, and Flickr can make any photo look like a treasure you found in the attic or a print on which you spent hours getting the exposure right. And we can’t seem to get enough.

7. Sweat to the oldies. It’s summer. You’re in the car with the windows rolled down. The radio is playing the same Bastille song over and over again. What to do? Switch on the XM and find the ’90s alt rock channel, of course. Satellite radio channels are the definition of niche — sure, you can find the newest indie tunes. But you can also listen to all Nirvana all the time on the Lithium channel.

8. Pass down family recipes. As our parents and grandparents get older, the thought that the family recipe for fried chicken might be gone forever someday may have crossed your mind. The adorable Cooking With Grandma series demystifies “you add a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper, some mind-your-own-business, and a whole lot of love.”

9. Force your favorite shows from childhood on your kids. If the newly released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live-action movie is any indication, ’90s nostalgia is alive and well. Fortunately, your kids and the younger set at the office needn’t suffer from missing the references. Clips and full-length shows are all on YouTube — everything from TMNT to 90210 and Saved by the Bell. 

10. Find out what your neighborhood looked like before you got there. No, there wasn’t always a Starbucks on every corner. Historical photos on Google Street View are changing the way we look at our neighborhoods and helping us think creatively about what we want them to look like in the future.

By Laura Hertzfeld