December 14, 2012
Fun Places on the Internet (in 1995)
The Smithsonian homepage in 1995
“Who hasn’t heard about the Internet? It’s mentioned on television, in the magazines, and on the radio. Everyone’s talking about it, and everyone wants to get connected to it.” So began the 1995 book, simply titled The Internet by Kerry Cochrane.
Do you remember your first time on the Internet? Mine was pretty typical for a kid in suburban America. It was 1995 and my parents had signed up for a free America Online trial using one of the millions of CD-ROMs that seemed to arrive at our house daily. My dad bought an external 14.4k modem for our Mac Performa and I remember tying up the phone line while talking in random chatrooms and looking up cheat codes for Dark Forces. The Internet was a precious commodity to me then — a metered experience that I had to track diligently so as not to waste a single minute. That is, until AOL offered flat-rate unlimited monthly billing in 1996.
Today the Internet has become a normal and essential part of our lives that we all seem to take for granted. Since high school I’ve probably used the internet every single day with very few exceptions. Today I get irrationally angry when a website doesn’t load within seconds. For a generation that has vague memories of life before the Internet, we now poke fun at just how oddly futuristic our behavior would’ve seemed just a couple of decades earlier.
But this future of online shopping and instant access to much of the world’s knowledge was not a given in 1995. As Kerry Cochrane explained in the introduction to her short book, everyone was talking about it. But there were plenty of skeptics. Clifford Stoll wrote an article for Newsweek in the February 27, 1995, issue expressing skepticism about this new-fangled contraption:
We’re promised instant catalog shopping — just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
But despite the skepticism — which was completely warranted when you think about what the Internet looked like in 1995 — there were people like Cochrane who were explaining to kids like myself what kind of worlds the internet had to offer.
The first three chapters of Cochrane’s book The Internet is devoted to explaining the basics of things like email and how to find your way around the internet using Archie, Gopher, Veronica and the World Wide Web. But the last chapter is where things really get interesting. Titled, “Fun Places on the Internet,” the fourth and final chapter is like a bizarre time capsule of the Internet’s baby pictures. Because even though the Internet’s “birth” can be traced to the first host-to-host connection at UCLA in 1969, the mid-1990s was really when the Internet went mainstream.
Some of the “Fun Places” shown in the book were expected, like an early e-card site and the Smithsonian home page, while others were a bit strange, like a random elementary school in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. Do you remember your first time online? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And yes, I realize many of you have been online long before I was even born so consider this a golden opportunity to be snarky about that fact.
And be sure to check out K. Annabelle Smith’s “Evolution of the Homepage” from this past June.
Hillside Elementary School’s home page displayed in Mosaic for Windows (1995)
Build-A-Card site displayed on America Online’s browser for Windows (1995)
The KidsCom home page displayed in Netscape for Windows (1995)
A “virtual exhibit” on the Dead Sea Scrolls from UNC (Netscape for Mac)
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
38 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
The first site I went to, with Mosaic 0.9 Beta (seriously, I remember that part) was in late ’94 or early ’95. It was “Disfunctional Family Circus” where they had the original strip’s art, but UGC captions that had a sick sense of humor. Someone hand-wrote the URL and told me to look at it (after the Mosaic page came up as default, of course). Heck, we didn’t even have a phrase for UGC back then, let along an acronym! (User Generated Content, btw). I remember I though “This is going to have a very narrow appeal.” I later wrote much of the 1.0 of Travelocity.com on that same computer! (When we all clued in to the power of the web)
My first contact with the internet was in my job at the Associated Press in 1983, where I edited print news stories for a new service called “CompuServe.” At the time, CompuServe provided news to business subscribers,among other services, and it was considered a high-end tool for busy professionals – more status than anything else.
I did not get online myself until 1994, when I signed up for CompuServe myself, and even then I was using their services more than the portal to the World Wide Web that it provided. Those were the days when access was tremendously expensive, and I could see dollar bills flying away as a website was loading.
It was 1982. Well, it was “sort of” the internet, I guess. At what is now the University of Illinois-Springfield, there was a primitive BBS system, the name of which escapes me. Had no idea I was getting a glimpse of the future, just remember how strange it seemed to be having “conversations” with strangers around the world.
As for my first home internet experience, good old Prodigy, somewhere around 1991. If I saw that color scheme today, I’d probably think my monitor was shot.
My first time on the internet was back in 1986 or 1987, when a friend of mine took me into one of the university’s computer labs to play a text-based interactive game, similar to Infocom’s famous Zork games, only this time you would log into a server at some distant location and then play the game with everyone else that was logged in (guess it is the Pong of World of Warcraft, come to think of it).
I was looking thru magazines at a barbershop and saw a “url” and copied it to a piece of paper. It was always something like “trg12.put/543./fde.com”. Never “boats.com”. I had a file sorter at home that had all of these long url’s.
I remember having email explained to me in 1991 or 1992. The person astonished me by reporting that she corresponded with her mother every day by email! It was my dad, however, who got me signed up with Compuserve, he was miles ahead of me (and still is).
This was a fun article with which to remember my days at CompuServe in the early 1990′s. I remember that the Smithsonian site was always one I would spend hours on! I was recently trying to explain an old style acoustic coupler modem. Oh my, how times have changed!!
I did not get on the internet until near the end of 1999. I was a stay at home mom throughout the 90′s until I went back to work in 1999. The first big purchase I made with my new found money was a brand new top of the line computer, and my second big purchase was my first digital camera. Back then both of these purchases were a lot more money than they are today.
My first time getting online was with AOL that came preloaded on my new computer. First month or two was free. I switched to Earthlink since my brother-in-law was a big-wig there, and I had discount through USAA. Tying up the phone line was a big pain.
I loved Netscape since I could use their free HTML program to create webpages that I could upload to my earthlink space. I created these pages to post family pictures. This was before My Space,Facebook and Flickr came into existence. Funny thing is I eventually left Earthlink and never did bother to post pictures anywhere else.
Oh God, this was my introduction to the whole WWW deal and what that was like! Boy those were trying times.
Does that book have my http://www.osc.on.ca website listed? The Wayback machine doesn’t go back that far (I created this in 1994) but there is a snapshot at http://web.archive.org/web/19970413071826/http://www.osc.on.ca/ that looks still familiar ;)
My first exposure to the web was I think in 1992, one of the grad students at my lab said he had to show me something; he was a very outed gay, and the site he brought up was Hunks On The Beach, a daily photo of muscle guys on some beach in Florida; I wasn’t much interested in the content of the site, but the media itself was most interesting — within the afternoon we had installed our own version of the CERN http server and had put our research papers “on the web” and sure enough, the number of cites of our work went up almost immediately. Quite a thrill, let me tell you.
The first website I ever went on was RedGreen.com when I was a sophomore in college in the computer lab using Netscape. I remember logging onto Mark Cuban’s AudioNet often so I could listen to radio stations from all over the country. I used to go on there all the time listening to the handful of stations it had in Dallas, Miami and other random places. It seemed like most stations online at the time were in small towns for some reason. I remember often listening to a radio station out of the Antelope Valley north of LA. It had the best programming of just about any station online, and there weren’t many and wouldn’t be until almost 2005.
The first time I went in a chatroom was in 1994 during my senior year in high school. It was over Prodigy and I couldn’t believe I was chatting with someone from New Jersey from my high school library. I remember I told the guy I was in my school library and he said “Libraries suck!” The school librarian just happened to be passing by at that time, saw what he had written and completely freaked out and complained to my Computer Science teacher. I remember I was just in a sort of high for the rest of the day because I had chatted with someone over the computer, it was one of the most amazing things I had ever done.
And believe it or not, that wasn’t all that long ago.
How about the firs time I used a modem?
I don’t remember the exact date, but it had to be in 1986 or so; it was a 300 baud manual device. You had to dial the phone number, and when you heard the screech, you put it in originate mode, turned it on and hung up the phone (if someone was calling you, you put it in “answer” mode). I don’t even think it understood AT codes.
Anyhow – after my parents bought it for me (I was like 13 years old), my first attempt to use it was to pirate a piece of software! Unfortunately, it didn’t work; me and a friend kept trying – we were trying to transfer a piece of software that had an XMODEM protocol (remember that?) built in, so I could then transfer a piece of paint software. Eventually, we gave up. I went to meet him, got the software, then we transferred the paint software via modem.
My first “real” connection was to a node on the Tymnet service – it was setup by NASA for the “Young Astronauts Program” which I participated in after school (ah yes, such a young geek I was).
After that, I dialed around to tons of BBS’s, and ultimately did a school report and interview with the founders of Mustang Software (Wildcat BBS).
Before I got out of high school, my parents had bought me a laptop (well, more like a luggable) with a 2400 baud modem. A much better experience overall. Later I got an Amiga and a 2400 baud modem for it. Gradually I upgraded to a 9600, then 14.4, then 28.8.
At some point in there in 1993, I signed up for internet service with Internet Direct – for a shell account. Yep – I got my first real internet experience from the place of the green card spam. Anyhow, I had fun with telnet, ftp, and gopherspace. Once I tried out Mosaic and visited a few websites, but ended up going back to the console and command line. I didn’t really start playing with the web until Netscape came out with their browser suite.
my first few years on the internet was called. webtv. yup old webtv. it was worthless to try to go even to yahoo or anything with java. but it got me and lots of other people into places like talk city chat, yahoogroups.com where you could discuss stuff. you could email people etc. it made me long for a puter. then i got one and webtv went out the door. we used aol.com as a home page. while i cringe of thinking about ever going back to webtv it got me on the internet enough to be more confident when i really did get a puter.
In my early days on the web I bookmarked a CNN article on “Websites That Suck” – and would you believe it, the story can still be found under the original URL http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/9702/07/webpagesthatsuck/ after more than 15 years (though the screenshots of the ‘sucking’ websites won’t load anymore – but the Website http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com they wrote about also still exists). Kudos to someone at CNN who either fights link rot … or forgot to delete this article.
1992, September. Returned to school for a career change and First site I recall visiting was an email site to set up my first email account. The next memorable Internet visit was in 1994, the Yukon, when I attended the public library’s class on the Internet.
I warned the teacher that my previous forays on computers usually ended with me crashing something. He laughed. He showed me how to load yahoo and search for something. I did, and the search wouldn’t load. The connection had gone down. Later when i went back for the rest of the lesson I found out the entire Yukon Internet had crashed the week previous (not that it was my fault but the timing was too perfect so I just said, yup, told you so.
I remember Compuserve! I remember when Netscape came out. I remember when web sites I visited were all text with no pictures or graphics. I remember when it took several minutes, not several seconds, to load a web page.
Believe it or not, the site in that last image — the virtual exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls — still exists. Sunsite became ibiblio, and the excellent people at ibiblio just let old sites live on forever: http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/deadsea.scrolls.exhibit/intro.html
The first time I used the internet was in college. I was incredibly upset that I had to go to the library in the cold weather to read information sent to me via email from a professor. The nerve!! This was probably 1997 or 1998.
1992-93 I would go over to my friend’s house after school and on weekends. We would dial up to BatBoard BBS and play the game “Band Wars.” Does anyone else remember Band Wars? You created band name, album titles etc. and sent invites to ‘tour’ and ‘party’ with other bands. When receiving an invite from another band you had to choose 1 through 5. I remember the score was based on user activity and popularity.
My friend’s dad has always been into tech so they were the first people I knew dialing up. They didn’t have cable TV at their house but they had the internet.
My first time using the Net in depth was back in 96/97 when I was 18. I was taking a Microsoft Office class at my local community college. Then I found out that the upstairs library had computers that were hooked up to the Net. Needless to say, the class went out the window and I spent all my time in the library searching random stuff on Gopher and the Web. I finished the class with a D.
We got our first family PC for Christmas in 1995 and my dad introduced me to the world wide web in late January or early February. Our Netscape Navigator homepage was Yahoo. Dad asked me what I’d like to look at, and I suggested something about the American Girl books or dolls. He showed me how to navigate Yahoo’s directory. Pleasant Company, the original AG manufacturer/publisher, either didn’t have a web presence at that time or had a website that gave basic information about the company without providing any information about their products.
We clicked on the first listed item in the American Girl subdirectory. It was the website of a woman who sewed and sold clothes for those dolls. I think it was a fairly unsophisticated e-commerce setup, but at the time it seemed pretty cool. (We didn’t buy anything because my seamstress mom was always whipping us up doll clothes out of her scraps. Ironically, this has come full-circle: after my parents’ messy divorce 14 years later, I helped my mom begin supporting herself on the Internet making and selling doll clothes.)
Within the week I was allowed to get online on my own. I had been reading a lot about math (via library books) and somehow got interested in the concept of factorials. The Ask Dr. Math website looked cool, but I was skeptical of his wisdom. (I remember a lot of newspaper and magazine articles warning parents to talk to their kids about online dangers, including hoaxes. I don’t remember mine doing much of that, but the articles scared me. I was nine.) Therefore, I devised a plan: play dumb and ask Dr. Math something I already know and if he answers me correctly he’s the real deal! I’m guessing there was a submission form, though later my dad would let me use his email to ask questions. This anonymous Ask Dr. Math submission is my first online communication with others:
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/59064.html
I was satisfied with his explanation.
I remember vividly the sound of connecting for the first time to AOL via dial up at home in 1994. Hooked everything up myself and was amazed it worked. At that moment I knew the Web was the new reality.
I was first introduced to the internet earlier that year by an organization based in Santa Barbara, California; I think it was called the Rain Network (anyone remember them?). They had a presentation at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Ventura, and I was hooked.
I’m from a poor part of that backward country known as England and didn’t get to go online until 1998.
I was aware in the 1980s that rich American kids had access to modems and had their own computers and telephones, which I thought was outrageous.
I didn’t hear about e-mail until 1991 when an Australian pen-friend asked me if I had an e-mail address. I probably could have used the college library to sort one out but it was all way over my head at the time.
I first heard someone – another Australian friend – raving about the internet in 1995 and noticed that the 5-star rooms in the hotel I was working at had dedicated sockets for laptop computer modems, and that some businessmen could access ISDN lines. That was before I moved to Spain which was even more technologically sedate than England.
Moved to London late in 1997 and got a job at a big TV station. Everyone there had work e-mail addresses except me so I helped myself to the computer and logged on for the first time early in 1998. First site I got into was ww.nme.com which had chatrooms and free e-mail accounts! I made a few actual friends through that site, plus a couple of really strange girls from Holland and Isreal who came to London to visit me – and got my first e-mail address, which was shut down a few years later.
Recently groups of online friends from some of the old chat forums of the late 1990s have been “reuniting” on Facebook, which is weird and nice.
My first time–1985 on a Commodore 64!
Wow, most of the people commenting on this were on the internet long before I was born. I don’t remember the exact first time I went on the internet, but I know it was in 1999, when I was in kindergarten. It would have been either barbie.com or pbs.org, haha. But my dad’s been in IT since the late 80s. I love hearing his stories about the early internet, and it was really interesting to read these comments.
A young man and his kid sister excitedly discover that their parents’ have just bought a home computer equipped with a connection to the “Information Network System”. The “Information Network System” is a worldwide computer network that enables you to have video chats with your friends (with the help of a handy little camera embedded in the top of your computer monitor), look up multifarious useful information, order food and consumer goods online, and retrieve all sorts of audio and video entertainment on demand.
Much to their chagrin, their parents are even more smitten with this newfangled technology than they are, and the parents all but monopolize the new computer system to themselves. He confers with his friends on his Little League team, and they all lament that a similar situation has developed at their own households.
Together they resolve to take matters into their own hands…and in the process they discover a strange creature that lives in the worldwide “Information Network System”, something called a “meme”…
The above is the plot of the premier episode of the second series of Meme Iro Iro Yume no Tabi (The Incredible Fantastic Journey of the Meme).
Airdate? 1984.
(For balance the same series also predicted that car bodies would be made of nitinol.)
Circa 1999, I started using Lego.com sporadically. I remember playing crude flash games. It wasn’t until around 2003 that I started using it regularly, largely because in grade school we had been told that every website was a porn pop up waiting to happen or a bunch of kidnappers who would track you down if your screen name had the same first letter as your real one. By the time I graduated of course nearly every major assignment required online questions or research.
I remember it was back in 1999, when I had just moved to the USA. Back then I didn’t really know what it was all about. I thought that the more time I remained on line, the more I would have to pay for that amusement…
So I started to attend the library of my town and one day I decided to send a e-mail to my relatives in Brazil, in order to tell about my new achievement!
The problem was that I had the idea in my mind, but didn’t know how to carry it out. I was a little ashamed of asking how to do it to the librarian, who was a woman, and in Brazil, usually the men are supposed to be wiser…
But after a while trying to resist, I finally decided to humbly ask her how to do it, and she told me to click on COMPOSE.
After that I learned that no matter how weird the question might be, it has to be asked in order to promote the apprenticeship.
!
I had used commercial packet switching networks like Tymnet and TeleNet in the late 60s, but my first internet encounter was in the summer of ’73. There were 256 internet addresses. The bottom six bits said which node, usually an IMP, and the top two said which of the four computers attached to the node you were referencing. There were machines in the Boston area, upstate New York, Sweden, England, California, Illinois and even Hawaii. You could log in as a guest and just poke around, compile programs, print manual, see who was logged in and so on. Stanford University’s site had access to an AP ticker so you could look up the latest articles by keyword. I remember following Watergate and the Yom Kippur War.
The internet we all know and love grew from this early version, and emerged from the government military and research ghetto thanks to Al Gore who insisted on opening the network to private parties. It’s interesting how much impact a VP can have by doing this kind of thing. Dan Quayle nearly destroyed the remote sensing business by insisting that it be profitable for the government. Before Quayle, you could order satellite imagery for the price of writing the magnetic tape, plus shipping, maybe $50-$150. After Quayle, the same data would cost $3,000-$5,000. Needless to say, you only bought satellite data if you had to. The internet could have remained a specialized research and defense oriented network, but for a VP who had a vision.
The first ever audio clip I downloaded was from the “CoolSiteOfTheDay.com”. Ahhhhh
I don’t remember the first website I visited, but I was a kid at the time, so it was probably the Nickelodeon website. I remember sitting there for 5 minutes waiting for shockwave games to load. And I got on TELNET once, even though it was about 10 years outdated, just to see the Star Wars easter egg the programmers put in.
I’m also surprised you didn’t mention the Wayback Machine at http://archive.org/web/web.php. Just type your URL into the Wayback Machine, and you can explore old, defunct websites from as far back as the mid 1990s. I will warn you, though, they can be addicting to browse!
I got onto the web in 1995 with an old PC-XT, 14.4 modem, and a local independent ISP that let me have a shell account. It was on the overlap of the “geeky” university Internet and commercial WWW, and got to use things like Archie, telnet, and usenet. I did WWW with Lynx browser and mail/usenet with Pine. It wasn’t until early 96 I got a computer that could run Windows and what was by that time Netscape and/or IE, with Trumpet Windsock. In late 96 I got a Windows 95 computer and upgraded to a 33.6 and eventually 56K and DSL.
I graduated high school in 1994. I wrote for the school paper and wrote an op-ed piece about this wondrous new “internet” that had come into being. My family didn’t actually get connected for another year or so, though, so it was all talk at that point. However, I was excited and saw the potential in it easily.
Anyway, my father signed up for Compuserve. We had a number for an e-mail address, and the address and password were written down and taped up on the desk for our reference. :-) Of course, it was all modem handshakes and not being able to be online and use the phone at the same time…kids today won’t know that joy.
I don’t remember where I used to go with it all, but at some point, I signed up for Yahoo, which is my oldest e-mail account now, although I can’t tell you how old because Yahoo is now stripping out all its old useful functions. Nice.
Moving away from the old modems was the beautiful part, I think. Websites improved in the expected fashion, but being online easily and all the time is what rocks.
Great article! I have been on the Net since the early 90′s.
My first experience with the internet was the first class I took in a Master’s in Educational Technology program in 1995. I was 48 years old and started with a Mac LC 3, but I had been fascinated with the possibilities I could see for technology in an educational setting. It was also the year the school where I was teaching installed a Mac Lab though we didn’t yet have internet access. At home I used Netscape before it became that. It was Mosaic. During the four years I took to complete the master’s degree, I took 3 classes that dealt with using the internet. It exploded that fast! In one of the classes I wrote a Virtual Field Trip to Washington, DC with HTML programing, and used with the few 8th graders who didn’t go on the actual field trip. The third class I took was on joining internet projects with other schools, and following websites on Web Quests. :-D I spent the last 12 years of my 40 year career, teaching 5th through 8th graders to use computers as a tool. This included all kinds of uses of the internet. I am still fascinated with the technology explosion. I have gotten the Smithsonian Newsletter for years with students.
What a great communication tool it has become! And I am amazed at how many people my age who are working very hard to learn to use it in their 60′s and 70′s!
my first visit was to Ebay
My first significant exposure to the internet was the world of chat rooms. My high school didn’t really understand the potential of the internet to suck up all your time, take you away from your school work and possibly get you hunted down by a lunatic, so we were allowed to hop on anytime we wanted, in the classroom. I can remember a room called Kyoto Cafe, where I chatted with people, about god-knows-what. I can also remember that people with better connections would purposely post giant photos in the chat so that the room would come to a stand-still. My first exposure to trolls! It’s interesting to me that my formative memory of the internet is about communication, rather than access to information. I value both aspects, but throughout my nearly 20 years online, the most significant differences it has made in my life are communication-based.
Oh yeah. Must have been late ’95/early ’96. I’m pretty sure the first website I ever went to was starwars.com. Of course, the main function of the internet for me was multiplayer matches in Warcraft II with my friend…try talking on the phone together, hanging up at the same time, counting 5 seconds, and trying to synchronize your modems so that you actually connected. Some days it went pretty easily, other days, not so much…