‍WASP on the WEB

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‍    Premiering in 1996, this award-winning website began with "just a few pages" featuring photographs from WASP Deanie Parrish's WWII scrapbook. It eventually grew to more than 2,000 pages, becoming one of the world's most comprehensive digital collections devoted to the Women Airforce Service Pilots. A feature in The New York Times in August 2000 introduced the website to a national audience and helped establish it as a trusted resource for students, teachers, researchers, and fans of everything aviation.

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‍    As new technologies emerged, the website expanded far beyond photographs and articles. Thousands of WASP records, photographs, videos, speeches, biographies, marching songs, lesson plans, and educational resources were joined by interactive learning activities designed for children and adults alike. Visitors explored paper dolls, coloring pages, aircraft recognition games, puzzles, and Morse code, while teachers, researchers, and aviation enthusiasts discovered original documents, oral histories, rare photographs, and historical records. WASP on the WEB was featured and linked by organizations including PBS, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and NASA, helping share the inspiring story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots with audiences around the world.

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‍    Although technology has changed dramatically since WASP on the WEB premiered in 1996, the website remains online as a historical archive. Many of its articles, photographs, records, and educational resources continue to be available. Some of the original interactive activities—created with pioneering technologies such as Java and Macromedia Flash—can no longer function in modern browsers. Rather than remove them, they have been preserved as part of the history of WASP on the WEB, one of the earliest educational websites devoted to the Women Airforce Service Pilots. The Arcade Archive preserves a glimpse of these original activities and the pioneering educational technology that helped bring WASP history to life for children and adults alike.

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‍We are grateful to have had the opportunity to help preserve and share the story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots at a time when so little information was available online. We hope this archive continues to educate and inspire students, teachers, researchers, aviation enthusiasts, and future generations for years to come.