The Personal Web
The web as we currently know it can be dated back to probably some time in 1993. That year saw the public release of the NCSA Mosiac web browser and some also make note of the "Eternal September" when AOL added Usenet access to its service the same year. I was into computers back in the day and graduated from High School in 1994. My father was in IT and had experimented a bit with the old BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) back before '93, and so I feel I've gotten to see the whole thing pretty much since the beginning. Though it is totally mundane now, the idea that you could hear from people anywhere in the world and they could publish sites that anyone could see... it was very exciting! The people using the web in the beginning were a smaller sub-section of folks than who would eventually arrive (almost everyone), and due to both that and the state of the tech at the time, it had a different feel and character. There were some beautiful things that have since mostly disappeared. One of the things I miss most are people's personal, quirky personal web sites.
Participating in the Internet: A History
From the beginning, their were a variety of ways to participate in the Internet beyond just consuming content, or reading what others had written.
- Usenet Newsgroups: Using NNTP, Usenet groups were somewhat similar to the later forums. There were thousands of newsgroups based on various interests and interested people could post messages to these groups and the messages had threading similar to e-mail threads. In earlier times, your ISP would grant you access to Usenet and you would dig up groups that interested you to participate in. The messages in these groups were passed between ISPs to keep the messages synced across the whole internet. Usenet is maybe the earliest place we see trolls, flamers, spamming and most of the other bad internet behavior we see today, as the groups really had no moderation. Still, valuable communities formed on these groups. Back in the day, it was one of the more accessible ways to engage with the larger internet.
- E-Mail: In a lot of ways, e-mail is still the same as it ever was. E-mail newsletters were more common than now, though they still exist. Before texting on mobile phones, it was also a good way to keep in touch with friends. In theory you could e-mail anyone you got the address of, and it didn't feel as intrusive as calling a stranger, so some networking occurred through e-mail. Another thing I see less of today were the chain-letters. Chain-letters originated in regular old paper mail, and e-mail chain-letters feel like the predecesor to a lot of the fake stories you'd later see posted by your conspiratorial uncle on Facebook years later. You might know someone that would forward a mail full of jokes to you. I just don't see this anymore, and I have to say I don't really miss it either. I do still treasure some old e-mails the same as one might treasure a physical mail from a friend. A record of a previous time, a kind of history of your friendship.
- ISP or University Web Space: If you were enrolled in a university, or you had an account with an ISP, often you were granted some web space. By today's standards the space granted was paltry, like... 1 to maybe 5 MB, but fortunately text alone doesn't take a lot of space. While most people, both then and now, don't really know HTML, the basics are within the grasp of everyone who cares to look. Back then usually you would type up your web site on your computer (which you could do in Notepad or really anything), then you would have to use an FTP program to upload your file(s) to your web space. It was pretty simple, but was enough of a barrier to keep most people from ever using the space their university or ISP gave them. In the university space, sometimes students were given accounts on university computers and could connect to them via telenet and just type up their site on the university Unix computer and save it in a folder that was published to the internet. Still, with this you could have a web site on the internet that anyone in the world could come visit! It was here that you started to see what I call "The Personal Web", personal, static, simple sites typed up by anyone talking about anything.
- Forum Software:
- Wikis:
- Internet Relay Chat:
- Instant Messaging:
- Geocities:
- Blogs:
- RSS:
- MySpace:
- Facebook:
- Twitter: