1998: Google!

1998: Google!

Google went live in 1998, revolutionizing the way in which people find information online.

1991: First web page created

1991: First web page created

1991 brought some major innovations to the world of the Internet. The first web page was created and, much like the first email explained what email was, its purpose was to explain what the World Wide Web was.

Thefacebook

Thefacebook

Facebook launched in 2004, though at the time it was only open to college students and was called "The Facebook"; later on, "The" was dropped from the name, though the URL http://www.thefacebook.com still works.

The Internet In 1996

The Internet In 1996

internet96

In 1996, the Internet Archive began archiving the web for a service called the Wayback Machine. They’ve now archived 55 billion web pages. That’s enough web pages that if you were to print them all out using your roommate’s printer while he was at class and tape them end-to-end, you could reach the moon and back 28 trillion times.

I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine’s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. They viewed the medium as a chance for inexpensive advertising and invested dozens upon dozens of dollars into it. The results are tremendously humiliating.

ICQ

ICQ

Once you were weaned off AOL, you still needed a reliable messenger to keep in touch with all your 133t friends and buddies, and back in the day, we didn’t have that newfangled skype software with its fancy video and voice chat, so if you wanted to send online messages, you used ICQ (I Seek You) and you got to toggle between instant message mode.....

Netscape Composer

Netscape Composer

When I first started browsing the web, my browser of choice was Netscape. Back in the 90s, Netscape Navigator actually had less credibility than IE, and the browser was often referred to as netcake by 1990s website elitists.  However, one vital feature that was bundled in with the browser, which started me off designing very badly coded but visually decent pages, was Netscape Composer. Composer.....