Virusworld was started as an anonymous FTP site in 1993 to distribute virus images I created from X-ray crystallography data, primarily for teaching. After 29 years the site has been retired, in part due to change of web server.
I wrote a page about this elsewhere, but here is the summary below:
Summary
VirusWorld was hosted since its inception at the Institute for Molecular Virology in 1993/1994 at the dawn of the World Wide Web. The site has not been updated since around 2014 and has been retired. However two (mostly complete) archives are available from two separate sources where visitors can find the original images:
| VirusWorld Legacy | VirusWorld Web Archive |
|---|---|
 |  |
| A “Legacy” version into which images have been reassembled in a responsive web design and grouped by both virus family and virus genus. | Web Archive” version, last copied on April 23, 2022: This archive is housed at The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) a digital archive of the World Wide Web launched in 2001. |
Notes
The VirusWorld Web Archive site pages retain the links that were included at the time. However, while some links still exist, some link to links within the Archive.org gigantic database, while other links are defunct.
The VirusWorld Legacy was constructed with a responsive web framework to facilitate navigation from smart phones or tablets. The site preserves most of all the original images.
These Virusworld archives and legacy sites should satisfy those that are searching for actual images originally used in scientific articles, PhD. theses, news articles etc.
Other virus image sources
In the 80’s and 90’s it required an expensive computer and expertise to create virus images from atomic coordinates that can now be created easily even on a laptop with free software such as UCSF Chimera or ChimeraX, and many other molecular graphics software.
There are also many free resources to download freely available images, for example from Pixabay.com or Pexels.com amongst multiple others.
Continue reading at https://bcrf.biochem.wisc.edu/virusworld/