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  • The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996

    http://www.slate.com/id/2212108

    Jurassic Web
    The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.
    By Farhad Manjoo
    Posted Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009, at 5:33 PM ET

    It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are—"Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

    Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL's default Web browser. Now what? There's no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There's no Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren't very big, and they don't hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you're constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you're paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you're tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You've got other things to do—after all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on.


    On June 25, 1996, Michael Kinsley introduced Slate in an inaugural column. Two months later, David Plotz wondered who pays for the Internet. In 1997, Carol M. Beach pondered the possibility of taxing the Web. In 1999, Timothy Noah credited the Democratic Party with the Internet's invention. In 2003, Kevin Werbach heralded the return of the 1995 Internet. In 2006, Paul Boutin examined the highly imprecise science of measuring traffic, and in 2008 Chris Wilson complained that the Internet was still infuriatingly slow.I started thinking about the Web of yesteryear after I got an e-mail from an idly curious Slate colleague: What did people do online back when Slate launched, he wondered? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I've got an answer: not very much.

    We all know that the Internet has changed radically since the '90s, but there's something dizzying about going back to look at how people spent their time 13 years ago. Sifting through old Web pages today is a bit like playing video games from the 1970s; the fun is in considering how awesome people thought they were, despite all that was missing. In 1996, just 20 million American adults had access to the Internet, about as many as subscribe to satellite radio today. The dot-com boom had already begun on Wall Street—Netscape went public in 1995—but what's striking about the old Web is how unsure everyone seemed to be about what the new medium was for. Small innovations drove us wild: Look at those animated dancing cats! Hey, you can get the weather right from your computer! In an article ranking the best sites of '96, Time gushed that Amazon.com let you search for books "by author, subject or title" and "read reviews written by other Amazon readers and even write your own." Whoopee. The very fact that Time had to publish a list of top sites suggests lots of people were mystified by the Web. What was this place? What should you do here? Time recommended that in addition to buying books from Amazon, "cybernauts" should read Salon, search for recipes on Epicurious, visit the Library of Congress, and play the Kevin Bacon game.

    In 1996, Americans with Internet access spent fewer than 30 minutes a month surfing the Web, according to Steve Coffey, who's now the chief research officer of the market research firm the NPD Group. (Today, we spend about 27 hours a month online, according to Nielsen.) In the mid-'90s, Coffey was working in the R&D department at NPD. He and his colleagues had long ago perfected ways to estimate audience sizes on TV and in print, and they wondered if they could port their ideas to the Web. They came up with something called PC Meter: A focus group of a few thousand people installed an application that would silently track everything they did online, and then Coffey and his colleagues would analyze the data. (Traffic ranking firms still use essentially the same methodology.) The NPD Group spun off Coffey's work into a new company called Media Metrix. In January 1996, the firm published what seems to be the first independent ranking of the top sites online.

    The biggest site, by far, was AOL.com; 41 percent of people online checked it regularly. Many didn't do so on purpose: With 5 million subscribers, AOL was the world's largest ISP, and when members loaded up the Web, they went to the company's site by default. For similar reasons, AOL's search engine, WebCrawler.com, was the second most popular page. Netscape, the Web's most popular browser, and Compuserve and Prodigy, the nation's other big ISPs, also had top pages.

    On June 25, 1996, Michael Kinsley introduced Slate in an inaugural column. Two months later, David Plotz wondered who pays for the Internet. In 1997, Carol M. Beach pondered the possibility of taxing the Web. In 1999, Timothy Noah credited the Democratic Party with the Internet's invention. In 2003, Kevin Werbach heralded the return of the 1995 Internet. In 2006, Paul Boutin examined the highly imprecise science of measuring traffic, and in 2008 Chris Wilson complained that the Internet was still infuriatingly slow.Yahoo, which Media Metrix ranked No. 4, just after Netscape, was one of the few sites in the Top 10 that wasn't affiliated with an ISP or a browser. Its main feature was its directory, a constantly updated listing of thousands of sites online. To produce the directory, Yahoo employees—actual human beings—reviewed new sites and cataloged them according to a strict hierarchical taxonomy. When you typed in what you were looking for—say, "new magazine," "sexy site," or "advice on taxes"—Yahoo would search its directory and return sites that it had already reviewed. This produced pretty good results—when you searched for "White House Web site," you could be sure you'd get to the right page because someone had actually looked up the official site. Obviously, though, such a model was unable to keep pace with the growth of the Web. In retrospect, it's telling that anyone in 1996 thought this was a sustainable way to catalog the Web. (In 2003, after acquiring the search companies Inktomi and Overture, Yahoo launched its own machine-produced search engine; now, the human-edited Yahoo Directory isn't even listed on the site's front page.)

    Some of Yahoo's 1996-era front pages have been saved in the Internet Archive. What's interesting about them is what they lack. First, no e-mail: The first webmail site, Hotmail, launched in July of 1996. There was no instant-messaging software; the first big IM client, ICQ, hit the Web early in 1997. The MP3 file format was invented in the early 1990s, but very few people traded music in 1996—the files were too big to cram down modems, and Winamp, the first popular MP3 player app, was published in 1997. All these innovations hit the Web suddenly, defying prediction, and each completely altered how we'd spend our time online.

    Still, some mid-'90s trends do prefigure our current Web obsessions. In Media Metrix's first listing, Geocities.com, a site that let you build your own home page, was the 16th most visited site. Over the next year, it grew significantly, Coffey says, eventually breaking the top 10. "And, of course, that was a precursor to blockbusters like MySpace and Facebook—it was the first we saw of user-generated content, which drives the Web today," Coffey says.

    There's a similar trend in blogging. The term wasn't coined until sometime in 1999, but several seminal blogs were already online by 1996, says Scott Rosenberg, one of the co-founders of Salon and the author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters, which will be published in July. Rosenberg points out that Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the Web, and Marc Andreessen, the coder who founded Netscape, had both set up frequently updated, reverse-chronological Web pages by the mid-1990s. Later, a Swarthmore College student named Justin Hall began links.net, where he'd post a short personal musing nearly every day. "I think I'm gonna have a little somethin' new at the top of www.links.net every day," he wrote in his first post, dated Jan. 10, 1996. Hall's site—unlike so much else that was on the Web back then—lives on today.

    If the Web was so completely different just a decade ago, what will become of it in the next decade? When we look back, will we laugh at how taken we were with YouTube—ooh, you can watch everyone's home movies!—and puzzle over how Google missed the rise of the Web-searching technology that suddenly sprang up to vanquish it? Maybe. On the other hand, some parts of the Web have become so deeply ingrained in the culture that it's hard to imagine any force killing them outright. In 2020, we'll get the Internet over electronic ink scrolls powered by algae or something—but we'll probably still be spending a lot of time reading Wikipedia.
    There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

  • #2
    Good trip down memory lane reading this article.

    I believe in 2020, there is a good chance youtube, Google, and Wikipedia will be around and major players. If not them, then something almost the exact same. While a lot has changed from then to now, those three things I can't fathom not existing at this point. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, and teach students that it is NOt a bad resource, and a good place to start. A lot of it is protected now, and much of it cites actual books. Not to mention that most of the "questionable content" is subjects like "Evolution vs Creationism" not on what the diet of Polar Bear is.

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    • #3
      Thanks astralis. Now I feel old.
      "Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by astralis View Post
        http://www.slate.com/id/2212108
        Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL's default Web browser.
        Sad to say but it's only been a couple of months since I got Firefox!
        “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” ~ Jimi Hendrix
        "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
        sigpic

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        • #5
          I think the article's a pretty shallow effort, and poorly written to boot. What about BBS's? What about other portals like Prodigy? GEnie? Compuserve? USENET? Independent ISPs? Game hint sites? MUDs? Downloading game demos like Doom for effing *free*? Freeware in general? The ability to actually obtain bloody drivers for bloody peripherals anytime you bloody-well needed them? The ramp-up of modem speeds? The competition with faxing? The tale of Netscape? Email joke lists? Etc.

          Come on, guys, there was plenty going on online in 1996.

          -dale

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          • #6
            Originally posted by dalem View Post
            Come on, guys, there was plenty going on online in 1996.

            -dale
            I was looking up pictures of Pamela Anderson and building a stupid angelfire website back then.
            "Every man has his weakness. Mine was always just cigarettes."

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            • #7
              We didn't need facebook and all that, we had online chat rooms :)):))

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Ironduke View Post
                I was looking up pictures of Pamela Anderson and building a stupid angelfire website back then.
                Angelfire...that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

                I had a site on Geocities...
                "Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Mobbme View Post
                  We didn't need facebook and all that, we had online chat rooms :)):))
                  Heh yeah, I used to have a number of Yahoo Messenger chatrooms that I visited everyday

                  But long before that, when net was just starting to catch up around here, I remember there was no private messaging etc., a chat room meant just a black screen window with a white font and the first thing anyone would ask you was A/S/L, and they wouldn't believe me when I said 12 M India
                  Last edited by Knaur Amarsh; 25 Feb 09,, 23:07.
                  When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep? - George Canning sigpic

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                  • #10
                    Mm.....1998 = tonnes of time wasted on Age of Empires multiplayer on the Internet Gaming Zone.

                    2 years later and you get GameSpy. Heh.

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                    • #11
                      I miss those noises coming out of my 28.8 Kbps modem, waiting to go online and then being refused a connection because I mis-spelt my password. Then ticking the save password check box after a successful connection, only for it to forget my 20 digit password everytime I logged on.......oh the good ol days!

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by astralis View Post
                        http://www.slate.com/id/2212108

                        Jurassic Web
                        The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.
                        By Farhad Manjoo
                        Posted Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009, at 5:33 PM ET
                        This is an interesting piece, but it does not well reflect my Internet experience in 1996. I did access via AOL, and the speed was lightning quick compared to using a 300 baud cradle to get on DARPAnet in the 1960s and 1970s, or the 9.6 kbps dedicated line I had at work in the late 1980s.

                        There was a lot to do on the Internet then (I didn't call it the World Wide Web, nor did anyone I knew). It continued to get larger, more interesting, and more useful until maybe 1999, after which it has just gotten larger, but in some ways less useful. I didn't spend any time playing games, watching dancing cats, or reading commercial sites like Salon. I downloaded and shared a lot of music in those days, and there was some streaming audio and video, although it only showed in tiny windows. People happily posted all sorts of things that would never be found today; useful and interesting things, yes, and also personal, and sometimes weird. The Yahoo directory was much more useful than today's Yahoo, which is so cluttered as to be unnavigable.

                        One page that was popular, with variations found on many home pages read "You have reached the end of the Internet."

                        And Dale is right: It was all about BBSs then. Lots to do.
                        Last edited by GraniteForge; 26 Feb 09,, 03:39. Reason: add

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                        • #13
                          Not to much internet back then for me.
                          To busy playing NovaLogic’s F-22 Lighting II

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                          • #14
                            Oh! The internet has a short history. It has changed so much within a very short time.

                            Internet became much more useful when the WWW browser came along. The first browser, Netscape, was introduced only in 1994. It was in the same year that we had the first full-text (instead of just the title) Web search engine called WebCrawler.

                            Google was founded in 1998.
                            Last edited by Merlin; 26 Feb 09,, 04:37.

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by gunnut View Post
                              Angelfire...that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

                              I had a site on Geocities...
                              Angelfire...LOL ditto!!

                              I had one on Geocities too, and it was (surprise surprise) about military aircraft. I was so ecstatic about it at first but never advanced very far in the development, all in all it was just one page consisting of an introduction and a few pics of USAF fighters!

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