The web circa 1996
As far back as 1992, when I was a freshman at Binghamton University (or SUNY Binghamton, if you like) in New York, I recall using the school’s “computer pod.” The pod had old school computer terminals where you could do a number of things education-related, but my favorite thing to do was to e-mail friends at other schools that presumably had their own computer pods. A number of high school friends had gone off to schools like SUNY Buffalo and Cornell University, and I was absolutely fascinated that I could communicate with these people (for free!) just by stopping by the old computer pod and logging in using my university account. There was even a form of instant messaging that was available, though it was local to our specific computer pod. People thought it was the height of high technology just to be able to say “hello” electronically to other people across the room. Not a far shot from texting your friend who is sitting next to you during a meeting at work today, I suppose!
Anyway, this bout of nostalgia was brought on by a Slate piece that recalls the wild earlyish days of the web — web 1.0 in its ascendancy — circa 1996.
t’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).
And here’s a nice bit on the history of blogging:
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.
