What the Internet Looked Like in 1995 [video]

Check out around 5:00 when they start describing the first live band to stream a concert online--a group of geeks from Xerox PARC in Palo Alto! And one of them, in the interview, says "If 100 bands tried to do [live streaming] at the same time, disaster would ensue. It may not be possible to do what we did in another couple years."

But perhaps my favorite part was right at the beginning, when they're talking about "electronic mail." John Markoff from the NY Times casually shows his email inbox..."Here's a message I got from Steve Jobs, for example." (!)

Markoff admits even then that email was hard to keep up with: "When you're in my position, you get hundreds or even thousands of messages each day..." And he shows off his fancy new Eudora "filters" that he's using to make his inbox usable.

Great piece of history...and it really shows how far we've come in under 20 years. I doubt any one of them would have predicted that the #1 Billboard hit in 2013 would come from a Korean band that no one had heard of...until they put a music video online that got over 1.4 billion views. Breathtaking, and it makes me excited for the next 20 years and whatever we're going to come up with next.

wavesounds2• 13 years ago

It's interesting how the problem of getting too many emails is still a problem 18 years later and the solution of 'filtering things into different folders' is still the best we can do.

logn2• 13 years ago

I think we have better solutions. Most of my social contacts are on Facebook with an optimized ranking system so I see what's important. Much of my work is handled on wikis instead of people emailing me documents. Links people might have emailed are now posted on twitter or other websites. Quick questions and answers are now in IM. Job inquiries are left on LinkedIn or HR management software.

If your inbox is jammed with work email, then you have a bad job. If your personal email is jammed, then you need to click 'Unsubscribe' more. Or you're a public figure, in which case they always have gotten mail, postal or electronic. The internet just let a lot more people become public figures, so be careful what you wish for.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

And none of the emails in his inbox were spam. Which was in itself notable.

joonix2• 13 years ago

I will always treasure the fact that I grew up with the internet during these times. Yes, even the old geocities pages. It truly was a "new frontier," and not everyone gets to experience something like that. It was all so exciting. People would come over and we'd just sit around and "play on the internet," trying out different things. Or we'd get some "warez" and think we were "hackers" because we could "punt" people off of AOL...

jweir• 13 years ago

I lived for Computer Chronicles in the 80's, but lost track of it in the 90's (when I didn't have a TV).

This episode on UNIX from 1985 (with a bearded Bill Joy) is great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7P16mYDIJw

Aardwolf2• 13 years ago

Unix, mainframes, and people with beards. What more does a TV show need?

michael_miller• 13 years ago

Technology has a way of feeling incremental. Think about this past year, what really happened? We got a slightly faster iPhone, Facebook did some interface tweaks, Microsoft released a new version of Windows. These seem like really small improvements. But if you look back to the original iPhone, what Facebook looked like in Zuck's dorm room, or what Windows 3.1 looked like, the change is staggering.

The linked video shows this phenomenon full effect. The internet in the video is slow, clunky, and ugly. How could a page take 30 seconds to load? Why does everything have a murky gray background? The difference between the web of then and now is staggering. But as someone who grew up through the early 90s watching the internet expand, it sure didn't feel like things were changing fast. It happened gradually - companies starting coming online slowly (and often with a very limited presence): nytimes, barnes+noble, moviefone. Then the internet started getting organized better, first with Yahoo's directories, then with search engines like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos. Then, Google came along, gradually improving their algorithm to the point where we can now access almost any piece of the world's information in seconds. In retrospect, there was so much going on during that time period, but living through it didn't feel that way.

More than anything else, I think this is a testament that having a real impact on technology in the long-term is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to have a vision, and incrementally improve on it constantly, even if it feels like you're not accomplishing much in the short term.

furyofantares• 13 years ago

Your point is well taken but there have also been a number of things that did not feel incremental to me when introduced to them. Google, DSL/Cable providers, Napster, iPhone, YouTube, and Bitcoin all felt like big jumps.

yareally• 13 years ago

Also wikipedia, stack overflow, multicore processors (no more having your system lock up on most heavy tasks), git versus svn/cvs. Lots of technological advances that improved things greatly. Just takes some additional thinking to recall what those things are.

I still recall going from a single core AMD to an Intel q6600 quad core CPU and thinking how amazing it was that I did not have to worry about my entire CPU locking up on one bad app going bonkers and eating 100% of the CPU. It became possible to have an app crash and max out a core and not even notice it immediately. Even when OSs and apps did not do mult-core processing overly well, I still manually set the affinity to most heavy apps so they were isolated to their own cores.

DanBC• 13 years ago

I found a book about mid 90's business cards. They are all, every single one of them, unusable today.

I also found another book called "Creating Killer Websites" by David Siegel. (http://www.killersites.com/killerSites/core.html) It's amazing just how different everything was.

I love the modern Internet, but I do wish the web had started with HTML & CSS, and everything else was kludged onto somewhere else.

Evbn3• 13 years ago

> How could a page take 30 seconds to load? Why does everything have a murky gray background?

This perfectly describes the modern. JS-overloaded "subtle shading" design of modern web apps...

The grey backgrounds were really weird, in retrospect. But they were cool and different! Oh, and that's why grey on grey is back-- fads coming and going to look cool and different.

unsigner• 13 years ago

Tiny espresso cup? At least Americans had taste back then!

lucb1e• 13 years ago

First time I ever saw a video in 144p on Youtube. Was this ever the main video format on Youtube?

runn1ng• 13 years ago

I know it's slightly off topic, but with the risk of being downvoted:

you want to see some really old-looking pages and feel some nostalgia? Just go to DMOZ - http://www.dmoz.org/ - and click through the categories. They have hundreds of pages that felt right out of 90s. (If they work at all.)

Mithrandir• 13 years ago

You can find more episodes of Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe (the spin-off) on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles

https://archive.org/details/netcafe

nuttendorfer• 13 years ago

Did anybody notice that the average internet user today is pretty similar to the one presented in the video? Users still need a lot of hand holding and guidance to use the web. Back then they used only a handful of sites which is still the case today with Facebook, Twitter and maybe a couple of other sites (news sites, craigslist, Youtube).

On another note I somewhat wish we could go back to a (slightly) less interactive web. Everywhere you go you are overwhelmed with social media plugins and calls to various actions (WE WANT YOUR ANSWERS! [taken from mentalfloss]).

Evbn3• 13 years ago

Adblock. Problem solved.

MRSallee• 13 years ago

Usenet looks a lot like Reddit.

onemorepassword2• 13 years ago

I was an avid Usenet user back in the 90's and an active redditor today, and only now I realize how right you are...

Evbn3• 13 years ago

Does reddit have killfiles?

milesf• 13 years ago

Then there was my era of "modern computing", the 80's. My favourite show back then was Bits and Bytes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VaBYw3swyg

timr• 13 years ago

For those wondering, the cafe in the youtube video is now Azucar Lounge, at the corner of 9th and Folsom. It's becoming a somewhat popular place for the people who work at the startups that are crammed in down here:

http://www.netline.be/presse/cybertaire/news/ccafe.htm#icon

http://goo.gl/maps/LEKrD

The more things things change...

onemorepassword2• 13 years ago

One thing I remember from those days is how fast the web changed. Every new browser version brought new features that people immediately started using.

Nowadays, a 5 year old site can still look and feel like it was made today. Back then, a 5 month old site was already outdated.

pfarrell• 13 years ago

1995: "How concerned should I be about information I put online?"

2013: "very concerned... In about 6 years."

1995: "...and this is usenet which is a collection of computer 'conferences'"

2013: "what? When I first logged on at Purdue, 1993, I thought of usenet as a public email inbox. Oh and hey 1995! Sell SUNW and buy AAPL.

rbanffy• 13 years ago

Am I the only one disturbed by the AT&T Unix PC being mirrored on the intro?

linuxhansl• 13 years ago

Wow that brings me back. I remember my first ping when I had my ppp connection to the internet after using BBS for years.

I actually had dealings with SoftQuad (the last interview) back then.

It's amazing how things change and how we just accept new stuff and take it for granted!

What the Internet Looked Like in 1995 [video]

Related Stories