The state of the World Wide Web in 1996
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.
No Google, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia or Twitter, and retailers like Amazon were still so foreign that magazines and newspapers had to explain how the sites worked every time they wrote about them.
Still, despite all the silliness and dead ends and wretched page design, many elements of the 1996-era Web did survive and prosper.
Heck, I remember checking NBA box scores on ESPN.com in
1994 in high school. And that’s pretty much what I was doing last night, too.
What’s really interesting to me, though, is that the Web basically did fulfill all the wildest hopes people had.
Remember when DotComGuy was a big deal in 2000 when he set out to prove that he could buy and watch and read everything he wanted on the Internet without ever leaving his house?
Today, he’d be just another college freshman who never leaves his dorm and subsists on pizza ordered online and World of Warcraft.
In other words, I think if you could go back in time and tell your 1996 self what the Web looks like in 2009, you’d probably feel like everything had worked out pretty well.
