Tuesday, March 3, 2009

The internet, circa 1996



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

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.

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.

First Google page: http://web.archive.org/web/19981111184551/http://google.com/
ESPN - 1998: http://web.archive.org/web/19981212013850/espn.sportszone.com/
Facebook - 2005: http://web.archive.org/web/20050806011211/http://facebook.com/

No comments:

Post a Comment