Farhad Manjoo: Jurassic Web
[Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society.]
The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.
It'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).
Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL's default Web browser. Now what? There's no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There's no Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren't very big, and they don't hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you're constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you're paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you're tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You've got other things to do—after all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on.
On June 25, 1996, Michael Kinsley introduced Slate in an inaugural column. Two months later, David Plotz wondered who pays for the Internet. In 1997, Carol M. Beach pondered the possibility of taxing the Web. In 1999, Timothy Noah credited the Democratic Party with the Internet's invention. In 2003, Kevin Werbach heralded the return of the 1995 Internet. In 2006, Paul Boutin examined the highly imprecise science of measuring traffic, and in 2008 Chris Wilson complained that the Internet was still infuriatingly slow.
I started thinking about the Web of yesteryear after I got an e-mail from an idly curious Slate colleague: What did people do online back when Slate launched, he wondered? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I've got an answer: not very much....
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The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.
It'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).
Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL's default Web browser. Now what? There's no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There's no Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren't very big, and they don't hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you're constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you're paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you're tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You've got other things to do—after all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on.
On June 25, 1996, Michael Kinsley introduced Slate in an inaugural column. Two months later, David Plotz wondered who pays for the Internet. In 1997, Carol M. Beach pondered the possibility of taxing the Web. In 1999, Timothy Noah credited the Democratic Party with the Internet's invention. In 2003, Kevin Werbach heralded the return of the 1995 Internet. In 2006, Paul Boutin examined the highly imprecise science of measuring traffic, and in 2008 Chris Wilson complained that the Internet was still infuriatingly slow.
I started thinking about the Web of yesteryear after I got an e-mail from an idly curious Slate colleague: What did people do online back when Slate launched, he wondered? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I've got an answer: not very much....