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 (10 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 [5 favorites]

I think I was online as a tween in like 1997 or 98!
posted by ellieBOA at 4:34 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]

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 [1 favorite]

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 [2 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 [3 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 [8 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

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 [1 favorite]

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 [1 favorite]