How The Internet Went Mainstream

July 6, 2024 3:59 AM

What the internet looked like in 1994, according to 15 webpages born that year [Fast Company] [via]
posted by ellieBOA (37 comments total)

iirc I went online at the end of 1995 in a ramshackle office of a "internet" startup in New Delhi. My life was transformed.
posted by infini at 4:13 AM on July 6 [9 favorites]

I think I was online as a tween in like 1997 or 98!
posted by ellieBOA at 4:34 AM on July 6 [3 favorites]

Now, anyone who could use a keyboard and mouse could traverse cyberspace.

In 1994 I had a computer, but it still ran on DOS. No mouse or fancy graphics. I did have email and access to Usenet through CompuServe. I remember the first time my roommate showed me the "World Wide Web" in the summer of 1992, I think? It was on lynx, and I remember him saying "here's where all the pictures would be if I had the software to display them." I don't think I got a copy of Mosaic till 1996.
posted by rikschell at 4:36 AM on July 6 [3 favorites]

Using a browser in 1994 certainly was not as seamless as today. If you were using a PC, you were probably using Windows 3.x if not OS/2. And base Win 3.11 didn't have a TCP/IP stack so you had to either install a third party one like Trumpet Winsock, or you had to pay more for 'Windows for Workgroups' which did include TCP/IP. Then you needed a modem and ISP, and at the time if you wanted real full-fat TCP/IP (and not a watered down captive portal thing like early AOL) that probably meant SLIP. You'd need to find a local provider of Unix shells, to which you would dial up, connect, enter your login name and password, then run the SLIP command, then finally start your TCP/IP client. It was far less automated than PPP, which came later. You had 'chat scripts' which could be used to automate all the unix shell login stuff, but that assumed you could write them yourself, or get help on Usenet or whatever. You'd better also know a thing or two about the Hayes-compatible init-string for your modem, because you'll need to be supplying that as well.

Anyway, once you had all of *that* taken care of (OS, hardware, ISP), you could use the built-in Windows ftp text-mode client to connect to ftp.netscape.com or whatever it was, to finally download netscape and get browsing. On your horribly slow dialup connection that maxed out at a few K per second at best, and your 640x480 (or perhaps 800x600 Super-VGA) little 15" CRT, or 17 if you were really lucky.

I would wager most people browsing the net in 94 were using some form of a school computer, and not their home system. For home gamers it was a heck of a lot more common to just use a BBS that had a Usenet gateway. That way you could tap into the wider knowledge of the global internet without actually doing any of the messy TCP/IP or graphical browser stuff. Win95 changed a lot of this because it had TCP/IP stock and PPP started taking off, and everything became AOL level "click button connect internet".
posted by Rhomboid at 5:08 AM on July 6 [17 favorites]

In 1994 I had a summer job in an astronomy department working on finishing up a project to put a star catalog online. It was my first exposure to the web and I really liked it. Lots of Perl scripts and vi.

I especially liked that we could connect references with an online physics abstract server. I’d had previous jobs where I did a lot of going to the library and looking up articles and photocopying them.

Later, while working at NIH, I got to meet some of the people who put together those servers for biological/medical articles and one of them gave me a CD of one of the very early versions of it.

The woman I worked for was the person who created the first Greek alphabet bitmaps so people could use approximately inline Greek characters in websites. I got to edit a few characters.

I worked on one of a handful of sun workstations, surrounded by astronomy grad students who were a bit snotty about me being there. We used X mosaic and I was super proud of finding a new bug in it.

Part of my job was to spend an hour a day just surfing the web to find new cool stuff. This clearly started a long lived very enjoyable habit.

After that summer I went back to college and managed to persuade my department that we needed a website. I basically took their grad school brochure and put it online. My boss at school was the department chair and was not really convinced of the utility of websites and just sort of let me do stuff until they were interviewing a new faculty hire, called her up to tell her about the department and she said she already knew about the other faculty and their research programs from the website. Then all of a sudden he was very interested. I ran their website for about four years.

Nice to see these old images which bring me back to a long time ago.
posted by sciencegeek at 5:18 AM on July 6 [9 favorites]

I see whitehouse.gov mentioned, and I once touched whitehouse.gov
In the '90s, I spent a fair amount of time in the computer room we referred to as EOP (Executive Office of the President) in the New Executive Office Building.
One day around 1994, I was wandering around in the mainframe room and looked down to see a high-end PS2 (IBM, not Sony), a model 70 or 80, sitting on the floor, and it was labelled whitehouse.gov.
So I reached out to put a hand on it.
posted by MtDewd at 5:29 AM on July 6 [23 favorites]

I'm pretty sure I had a dialup account via Netcom and then Primenet by the first year Wired was being published. '92 or '93. But this was on a janky 486 SX/25 that did not run Windows.

Then in late '93 or '94 I bought a secondhand Mac Centris and so had a reasonable desktop, and so was using Mosaic and then Netscape via a SLIP/PPP connection.

The first Rockstar Studios software I used was not any of their games, it was GearBox.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:44 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

1994 was the year I started programming (wrote my first few projects in C++ and made custom modded levels for Doom) and scripting (built a simple website intended for viewing on the Mosaic browser). I'm pretty sure that that was the year the entire current trajectory of my life took initial shape.

Also, I have a book on my coffee table right now that is a 1994 "net guide" that is mostly still focused on newsgroups. In the article, the "overview of the internet" video's splash screen shows a cyan book on the right, and that's the one I have. I keep it as a memento.
posted by mystyk at 5:44 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

We had a threeple nuclear family in 1994, two forty-somethings and a two-year old. We got a computer and I promptly found a parents' chat room. Well, pretty much a moms' chat room, although I was a dad. I'm the opposite of tech-savvy, so I don't even remember what kind of computer it was, but the screenshots on the Fast Company article brought back the whole experience: sitting in the basement, with a dial-up connection, watching the chat crawl across the screen, really enjoying the real-time voices of other adults grappling with baby issues.
posted by kozad at 5:55 AM on July 6 [3 favorites]

In 1995, the first and only place I could access the internet was on one of two computers in my high school library. You had to make a reservation in advance to use them. The librarians were obviously concerned about what content students might access on "the information superhighway". We were required to write down, on paper, the full URL of every single web page we visited. And sumbit for review after each browsing session.
posted by Kabanos at 6:15 AM on July 6 [4 favorites]

Who knew Pizza Hut was such an innovator?!?

and I was really hoping that the link to the dialup modem whistles from my 1982 lab computer internet connection was the real thing (although the imitations were pretty good!)
posted by bluesky43 at 7:33 AM on July 6

In the 1980s, I'd become used to using the Net on the college machines at "high" speed. After undergrad, me and a couple of friends ended up renting a house literally across the street from the computer lab so we could continue to easily pop over to log on. I still remember the shock from 1993 onwards as wave upon wave of people seemed to be appearing online. Around that time, we started booting our first campus web servers. It was not until I moved again, around 1995, and had to get my own modem that I was shocked at how slow the consumer web felt. Most web site were glacial. I was working at an early distance learning startup and we agonised over adding every graphic.
posted by meehawl at 7:41 AM on July 6 [3 favorites]

In 2024 I had to close the Fast Company page because it overlaid video I didn’t ask for, wants cookie approval which I never give, showed enormous ads obscuring the content on my phone, and never showed and images of the 1994 web that I went to look for, perhaps my phone was out of memory.

I remember the 1994 web just fine. It looked like shit, but it was oceans better than what we have now.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:52 AM on July 6 [6 favorites]

It looked like HotWired: Web 101.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:57 AM on July 6 [2 favorites]

My first real exposure to the internet was in the early 90's. I had been given a restricted dial-up shell account by Steve Jackson Games as a "builder" on their MOO. It was there I began to use the lynx browser as well. I resisted graphical platforms and much of the commercial web until it became impractical with my work. But now I'm retired =)
posted by jim in austin at 7:59 AM on July 6 [4 favorites]

I was also on the Internet in the late 80s, and didn't actually have graphics on my personal computer until sometime around 2001. I insisted on using lynx for the web throughout the 90s.

To me the Internet was NNTP, IRC, SMTP, FTP, and telnet (later ssh). It was mtrek and MUSH/MUSE/MOO. We'd roll our eyes at people and loudly type The Web is not The Internet!!

Whether I was using it at 300bps, 2400, 57600 or T1 speeds, it was always about text to me. We were sure turning it into TV was a fool's errand, at the time, but alas it seems to have happened.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:00 AM on July 6 [3 favorites]

I had been given a restricted dial-up shell account by Steve Jackson Games as a "builder" on their MOO.

Were you around for Operation Sundevil/SJG v USSS era?

[Per wikipedia, I should note that the SJG raid was apparently not properly part of Sundevil.]

Steve Jackson Games v. US Secret Service
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:03 AM on July 6 [3 favorites]

So here's some old early-90s grognard pedantry:

The Internet is an internet. The World-Wide-Web (WWW) is the name of a specific web of hypertext pages. A web page may be on your intranet, but a Web page is on the Internet which is what hosts the WWW. Typing "webpage" is very German of you, and you should stop doing that in English.

Before everyone called everything "an app" there was a weird period where the word "applet" started creeping into odd contexts out of sheer laziness and ignorance. An "applet" was a term for Java programs that ran entirely in a browser, with a more limited runtime. This was back when everyone laughed at JavaScript trying to steal some of Java's valour with that absurd name: everyone knew JS was a toy, and Java was an actual programming language.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:13 AM on July 6

Were you around for Operation Sundevil and the E-911 scandal?

I wasn't an employee, although I did visit their offices several times. I was a Blue Gelatinous Cube named Quiver that answered questions and built (hopefully) interesting things on their Metaverse MOO. It was my first and last encounter with something Object Oriented...
posted by jim in austin at 8:30 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

Early '94 was when I finally figured out how to access Usenet at work, and work was never boring again. It was late '94 when I noticed some co-workers had Mosaic running on their machines; and soon, I was too. Didn't finally knuckle under and buy my own computer and internet access until early '97, but it was around 1995 when I got that weird cold call at home from an unknown broker advising me to buy AOL stock, advice which I foolishly ignored.
posted by Rash at 9:08 AM on July 6

When I think of internet in 94 I see: low framerate video of paper cranes (broadcast on the mbone to a university mac); a graphical gopher browser struggling to download lots of Escher art; a custom non-web university portal that was sort of what you'd get if you asked a grad student to make an AOL clone; lots of windows full of text; wild line-drawing graphics trickling over a modem from a BBS (RIPscript). The web was there but it was barely the focus and half the time it was text-only.
posted by joeyh at 9:37 AM on July 6 [2 favorites]

Spring of 95, I was in one of my high school classrooms, playing around in these "chatrooms" on AOL (or maybe compuserve). By Fall of 95, I was at the University of Illinois. I'd been automatically assigned an email address. I couldn't quite grasp what that was, but I had a friend who showed me how to use Pine to access my email. Every computer lab around campus had Netscape Navigator, which was so slow. Much faster to just access bulletin boards and 'finger' for 1:1 chats. Remember bringing my cd's and headphones - pop the cd into the computer and plug in for some tunes while surfing the night away in the basement of Illini Hall. (Memory is fuzzy on whether that's the right building name.)
posted by hydra77 at 10:12 AM on July 6 [2 favorites]

I remember vividly the moment my friendgroup (internet veterans by then, me since 1985 and some others not much less) realized the internet had gone *truly* mainstream: a url turned up on someone's cereal box, at some point in the mid-nineties.
posted by tavella at 10:40 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

In 1994, the modern Internet (which you always capitalized

Well, that's wrong. The media always capitalized it but I don't remember doing so. I also always refused to put the hyphen in "e-mail."
posted by joannemerriam at 10:54 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

And base Win 3.11 didn't have a TCP/IP stack so you had to either install a third party one like Trumpet Winsock

Man, rhomboid really hit me in the feels on this one. This was exactly my whole setup at the time except for Chameleon TCP/IP instead of Trumpet. Getting this all to work exactly right was tricky but, man, the reward was really great.

My one little internet claim to fame is that one site I built with that stack, Pinball Expo 1994, is still up and running. We were editing some of it live from a hotel room using a QuickTake 100 for photos. It'll be 30 years old this fall.

Every once in a while it makes one of those "oldest deadest sites still on the Internet OMG" pages and it's fun to see it get rediscovered. The Lysator computer club at Linköping University was kind enough to host it back in the day and I think they still keep it up and running for bragging rights. I never heard back from them after the 1990s. If any of you kids you're reading this, toppen tack!.

All I need to do now is outlive Space Jam.
posted by mookoz at 11:06 AM on July 6 [11 favorites]

In 1994 I was finishing up my CS Masters and the local PBS TV station (my boss's brother was on the staff) did a story on this new Internet thing and taped it in the graduate computer lab featuring me. It was just transitioning from being under the control of the NSF and allowing commercial use. I used the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) website to demonstrate audio since it conveniently used the .au format native to Sparcstations.

I still have the Beta cassette, though I don't have a Beta VCR anymore.
posted by tommasz at 11:11 AM on July 6

Back in the early 90's I worked for an ISP, one of the NSFnet regionals. Our offerings were 56K leased-line, 28.8K dedicated modem, or 28.8 shared pool. We had a customer who had registered books.com, and here's how his business worked. You would send him an email saying "I'm looking for the following book", he'd then find you said book, email back a price, and then you sent him money and he sent you the book. That's what the pre-web Internet was like. I think he eventually cashed out during the dot-com era.
posted by Runes at 11:43 AM on July 6

Were you around for Operation Sundevil/SJG v USSS era?

One of my housemates was. He was doing playtesting etc. for the GURPS Cyberpunk book. I remember him talking with me in the kitchen, next to his room: "Huh, the Steve Jackson Games board went offline. I wonder what that's about."
posted by doctornemo at 11:47 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

1994 and the web... I was a grad student at the University of Michigan. Studying English lit, and I told everyone in sight that the World Wide Web was something lit people should be all over, as a new venue for reading and writing.

We have a big desktop computer at home. Our toddler daughter once carefully poured my coffee into its keyboard.

I mostly got to the Web on campus. A friend, then a librarian, showed me an X-Files fan page and I was hooked. Ended up explaining URLs to a bunch of professors.

I'd already been online for years, with Usenet and Gophernet...
posted by doctornemo at 11:49 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

For a non-tech person, I was surprisingly ahead of the game. I had email when I started college in 1985. I didn't know what email was, but the day we arrived on campus, my high school boyfriend had me give him my ID and a mysterious pink piece of paper from my registration packet. He came back with them an hour later, along with a tiny piece of paper with my email address and an interim password he created for me. It was a long time before I had anyone to send email to other than my boyfriend, and he lived in the same building, so our emails (in this pre-cell phone era) were usually, "Let's eat dinner at Sage" or "I'll met after your lab is over." (FWIW, Cornell University gave you an email address when you started and you got to keep it forever. They still do.)

By the end of that fall semester, I was using Usenet on the VT100s (big, boxy monitor/keyboard things with black screens and orange or green text) in the computer labs, sure someone would recognize that I didn't belong there. For the first few years, I was the only girl I'd see, and everyone else appeared to be doing actual work, mostly in scientific fields; I was reading Rec.Arts.Startrek and little else, but it felt like the future.

Sometime during grad school, I got on GEnie (which I imagine was much like AOL, which I was never on). I had my own Geocities page in 1995, and internet service at work (a TV station) around that time, but the chief engineer and I seemed to be the only people using it for anything except email. I still very clearly remember the days of having to type a string of numbers rather than a website name.

Not counting the Windows PCs I used when I worked in TV (and the VT100s), I've always owned Macs since 1985, so I always had graphics, such as they were. I knew I had to upgrade Macs at the point when instead of being fed the right graphic, I'd have a small blue square with a question mark in it.

Apparently, I moved from GEnie to Earthlink (and then the real internet) by March 1998. From 1998 onward, I recall spending a hunk of time at work and at home on DawsonsWrap, which became the site Mighty Big TV (which eventually became TV Without Pity), and because I was a TV program director (and because I had my own office), there was no chance of me getting in trouble for playing on the internet. I know I used Netscape Navigator until Safari was a thing, and Ask Jeeves until Google went mainstream.

I never learned to program, but I learned just enough HTML to format the FCC reports I had to write; the rest of the TV station staff was just frightened enough of the internet that my boss would steer clear of me during the part of the quarter when I was working on those reports. People would suddenly speak in hushed tones when they saw me working. Being one of the few in my (work) circle who knew how to "use the internet" in the pre-Google days really made the air feel pretty rarified. We've almost all forgotten how it seemed like magic back then.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 1:27 PM on July 6 [6 favorites]

I'll tell you what didn't age well, one of my handles from 1996 on the HomeArts boards (owned by GoodHousekeeping natch) was net-i-zen
posted by infini at 1:55 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

My first email address was @arpa.mil, in '93.

Amazing times.
posted by jgirl at 2:27 PM on July 6 [2 favorites]

Mine was too! Back in 1985, I think it was even just first name at the time. I'd have to dig through the old sf-lovers digest to see, assuming someone has them archived somewhere, I'm pretty sure I posted to that once or twice.
posted by tavella at 3:33 PM on July 6

I know I'm in the minority here but I still love the gunmetal grey backgrounds and blue links of the old web. Seeing webpages that look like that just kinda makes me feel calmer.
posted by signsofrain at 7:07 PM on July 6 [3 favorites]

I first used real email in 1991, via dialup to a college where my dad worked in IT support. But in 1990, my high school had inherited some flavor of PDP-11 running RSTS/E from another local college, along with two classrooms full of actual DEC VT-100s connected to it via serial cables.

I had a couple of friends a year ahead of me who’d been exposed to the pre-web internet in a summer program at MIT. With their vision from seeing the real thing, and me doing programming grunt work, we started collaborating on implementations of email and newsgroups entirely within this classroom system. At first there was no way to save data permanently or exchange information between accounts, but the more intrepid of my friends managed to create a privileged account by sneaking into the lab while the teacher who monitored it was away from her desk. From there, we were off to the races. We roped in another few CS students, and for a brief time, we all enjoyed our own private “internet” during and after school.

That is, until the whole thing came crashing down when someone accidentally printed the entire source code of the system on a printer in a teacher’s office that we couldn’t get into. Fortunately, it was a simpler time, and the system was isolated, so we escaped serious consequences. But there was certainly some heat, which my friends were generous enough to take most of, since the administration didn’t want to actually prevent them from graduating. I hesitate to imagine the consequences of this kind of thing even a couple of years later.
posted by mubba at 9:50 PM on July 6 [2 favorites]

My university left all the ports open on the student server so I set up Apache in '94 and ran a bunch of websites off http://acs2.bu.edu:3000/, :3001, :3002, etc. That got me my first job and a decent 20-year career.
posted by eamondaly at 12:51 PM on July 7

I had an email address and some exposure to Usenet as early as 1989, through a Fidonet BBS. By 1990 or 91, I was on Mindvox ([e-mail] 4ever!), in addition to having dial-up shell access to my university's Xenix systems. I was exposed to Mosaic on SunOS (or maybe Irix, depending on which lab I was in) in 1991 or 1992 at University, and at that point I was hooked.

I rather quickly learned the ins and outs of Trumpet Winsock, SLIP/PPP (and slirp on the Unix side, when you were stuck with "just" a shell account). By 1995, I was working as a sysadmin for one of the sites mentioned in the article (hotwired.com). I wasn't there for its launch, but I took over responsibility for the servers that displayed (and counted) that "You Will" banner ad, and ran them for several years.

It's led to a pretty interesting career, but as I watch the charlatans who took over the business of the internet work towards their inevitable end-game through the grift of AI, I'm really looking forward to retiring.
posted by toxic at 1:00 PM on July 7 [2 favorites]