The fickleness and sluggish speeds and the modem’s loud dial-up whistles : These lost markers of the early Internet suggest a time when our information superhighway was little more than a humble country road. The highways and megalopolises would come later, courtesy of some of the world’s biggest corporations and increasingly peopled by bots, but in 1994 the internet was still intimate, made by and for individuals. Even such corporate like Microsoft’s were managed by a single person. Soon, many people would add “under construction” signs to their Web pages, like a friendly request to pardon our dust. It was a reminder that someone was working on it, another sign of the craft and care that was going into this never-ending quilt of knowledge. Signs like those can be hard to find on today’s internet. As the web slides into a new period of decline—warped as it’s become around platforms and profiteers and propagandists, polluted by the scrapings and regurgitations of bots and spam and slop and slime—there’s a growing push to return to the principles of the old days. Beyond nostalgia, there might be something useful about looking back at the baby Web when it was still the Next Big Thing . What screenshots we can still get are like windows into an alternate world. Look in and think about how and why this web grew the way it did, and what could have been. Or try to imagine what life was like when the web wasn’t worldwide yet, and no one knew what it really was. Whitehouse.gov [Screenshot: Alex Pasternack / OldWeb.today] The Clinton administration had come to the White House with big plans for the “information superhighway,” but no one had thought much about setting up a Web page. Then, in November 1993, the White House purchased a costly T1 line—a dedicated connection to the internet via DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—and Jack Fox, the White House IT director, wanted to know what they were going to do with it. He posed the question one morning at a meeting of aides and executives, including Anthony Rutkowski, a representative from Sprint, which had the T1 contract. There was a long pause. Finally, Rutkowski—inspired by his family’s recent visit to the White House—put an idea on the whiteboard for a basic “virtual tour.” Everyone liked it. Except, it turned out, his bosses at Sprint, who saw no reason why the telecom giant should start building websites. Rutkowski got to work on a home workstation. “Images from the guidebooks my father had purchased were scanned, and an initial prototype website was created,” he recalled in a 2020 essay. “My young daughter Kelly contributed to the design, insisting that any White House site had to feature Socks the cat.” [Screenshot: Archive.org / OldWeb.today / Alex Pasternack] After receiving the green light, the next step was to reach out to a friend: Eric Schmidt, Sun Microsystem’s “ubiquitous, always available” CTO. The future Google chief and frequent White House guest loaned out a couple of Sun’s new quad processor servers, which were then set up in an empty old room in the Executive Office Building. Tony Villasenor at NASA was brought in to help with programming. But Rutkowki and his team struggled with two basic challenges. First, finding photos and audio for Socks the cat, which users would be able to play in a popup window. Second, figuring out how to link to other agencies, almost none of which had websites. A prototype White House website index page was assembled and printed in color for someone to hand out—allegedly by POTUS—to embarrass agency heads without a Web presence into getting to work. “Those who didn’t have sites appeared in a dull gray on the index,” Rutkowski recalled. “It took several months to get even a few of them online.” [Screenshot: Archive.org / OldWeb.today / Alex Pasternack] WhiteHouse.gov’s design, with its skeuomorphic gestures, occasional cursive font, clip art, .wav files, and cats, is very early Geocities , although it preceded that community of websites by a year. In addition to welcome messages from the president and vice president, there were pages dedicated to “ Publications ” and the First Family , and even a sampling of the vice president’s “large personal collection of cartoons characterizing his public life.” (One page was left unfinished: “Some text goes here. Blah blah blah blah,” someone wrote.) When the site launched on October 20, 1994, it was one of the first government websites of its kind anywhere. “The effects,” Rutkowski remembered, “were exponential, immediate, and global.” Yahoo! [Screenshot: Kottke.org / OldWeb.today / Alex Pasternack] Searching and finding things on the ballooning Web was already a serious challenge in 1994. That January, one promising approach appeared at “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” an online directory of favorite websites launched by David Filo and Jerry Yang, electrical engineering PhD students at Stanford. Inspired by slang that Filo heard in his native Louisiana for a “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth” person, in March they renamed it “Yahoo! ” and created the backronym, “Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle.” Other big search engines and directories launched in 1994, including Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite, Lycos, and the World Wide Web Worm . But an eon before Google.com arrived in 1998, Yahoo! became the most popular way to find things online. The URL officially changed in January 1995, and soon the site added a search engine and a news page and an email provider, all of which are still going —which does seem worthy of an exclamation point. (The original home page is long gone, but Jason Kottke has thankfully preserved an original version .) The Olympic Games (and IBM ) The first Olympics Web page [Screenshot: courtesy of Morten Paulsen] Oslonett was Norway’s first Internet company; and in 1993, after offering services like email and Usenet, it was preparing to offer its users access to the World Wide Web. The upcoming Winter Olympics in Lillehammer offered an ideal opportunity. The company signed a deal with Sun Microsystems, one of the game’s sponsors, and with Norwegian TV, to put up a live-results service along with pictures of the events. By the second week of the Games, the Oslonett server and a mirror at Sun in California had been accessed 1.3 million times by users from between 20,000 and 30,000 computers in 42 countries. “That demonstrated how a site can get overloaded,” remembered Berners-Lee. [Screenshot: Jakob Nielsen / Nielsen Norman Group ] Oslonett got the attention it wanted, but other corporate sponsors were unamused. IBM, a main sponsor of the Olympics, didn’t like all the free publicity that rival company Sun was getting. “They tried to stop it,” Steinar Kjærnsr ø d, one of Oslonett’s cofounders, told Robert Cailliau and James Gillies , “but it was completely legal, we’d made sure it was legal!” Executives at IBM were still stewing over Sun’s coup when they rolled out the company’s first Web page that May. Sun pushed out its own first webpage soon after. Microsoft [Screenshot: OldWeb.today / Alex Pasternack] One of the main reasons Microsoft started a website in 1994 was customer support. At the time, the company managed support forums for customers on CompuServe, one of the earliest major Internet dial-up service providers. “We had started to build up a community there; people would answer questions for each other,” Mark Ingalls, a Microsoft engineer in 1994 who would become the site’s first webmaster, recalled in a company history . He was also the only website employee at that time, other than his boss. [Screenshot: Jakob Nielsen / Nielsen Norman Group ] Included on the splashy image map on the front page were links to such artifacts as Microsoft TV, Microsoft techNet, Windows Socket, and gopher.microsoft.com, the company’s pre-Web Internet presence. (MSNBC, its internet-savvy news venture, wouldn’t launch until 1996.) There was even a page dedicated to “Facts about the server,” which included a photograph of Ingalls standing next to a single machine. That year, Nielsen Norman Group, a UX consultancy, reported that all users surveyed “liked” this page in particular. “They felt that it was nice to know that they were communicating with a service supported by an actual person and not a faceless entity. The users also liked being able to read the technical specifications for Microsoft’s server, again from the perspective that the information was not just coming in over the wire, but was coming from somewhere.” Time Warner’s Pathfinder [Screenshot: Jakob Nielsen / Nielsen Norman Group ] Time Warner’s Pathfinder was one of the first web portals , created as an all-encompassing entry point to “multimedia” content (photos! graphics!) from across the media behemoth’s titles, including Time, People, Fortune, and Vibe . The site opened on October 24, 1994, with a small content team that included Walter Isaacson and an eye-catching design. (For the time, it was a lot . According to one contemporaneous report on the site’s usability, “all users found the Time Warner page too complex.”) Now that the Internet could look something like a magazine, the site was meant to inaugurate a new era of digital publishing. “We have every base covered now,” Isaacson, then editor of new media at Time Inc., told the New York Times . “We are going to have the best and the most ways to distribute our journalistic content to consumers, in any form they want—TV, on-line, CD-ROM, cable and, of course, our core business, print.” Still, the paper noted “a looming question”: Who’s making money putting journalism online? “No one is making money,” said Richard M. Smith, editor-in-chief and president of Newsweek, who also was in charge of the new-media committee for the Magazine Publishers of America. “And no one should expect that anyone should make money at this early stage. It’s research and development.” By the time Pathfinder closed in April 1999, it had cost Time Inc. somewhere between $100 and $120 million. Ironically, it was Pathfinder’s failure that may have led to Time Warner’s eventual pursuit of a merger with AOL, a $360 billion tie-up that sought to generate “synergy” between the old media empire and the one-time digital giant. But then, with the rise of broadband internet, the whole enterprise came crashing down: AOL was eventually spun off from Time Warner in 2009, acquired by Verizon in 2015 for $4.4 billion, then sold, along with Yahoo!, to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion. These days, AOL is part of Yahoo! . Global Network Navigator If you wanted to get online in 1994, your paper bible was Ed Kroll’s Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog , a 600-plus-page tome of how-tos, explainers, and histories. When Berners-Lee first proofread it, in Chicago in the spring of ‘93, the Web occupied just one chapter. But Tim O’Reilly , the book’s 40-year-old publisher, had big plans for the new frontier. He’d just started a four-person “skunkworks” team to begin planning for a new website, a portal for Kroll’s guide and the rest of the publisher’s content. [Screenshot: Mosaic/W3c] Global Network Navigator (GNN) was officially launched in August 1993, under the leadership of Dale Dougherty and Lisa Gansky , as “a free Internet-based information center that will initially be available as a quarterly,” consisting of “a regular news service, an online magazine, The Whole Internet Interactive Catalog, and a global marketplace containing information about products and services.” The online “magazine” would be free and wholly supported by advertising. By June 1995, GNN had more than 400,000 regular viewers, with 180,000 subscribers to its mailing list; advertisers such as Mastercard and Zima paid as much as $11,000 a week. Things went downhill after AOL bought GNN from O’Reilly & Associates in 1995 for $11 million in stock and cash, and reintroduced it as an internet service provider. By the time AOL finally fired GNN’s staff and folded it into its own ISP in late 1996, GNN had become the fifth-largest ISP in the U.S., with 200,000 subscribers. The first banner ads Wired ’s home on the Web, HotWired , launched on October 7, 1994, with a colorful, irreverent look that would help set the bar for early web design. And as part of its business plan, the site would depend upon a corporate sponsorship model, with a new kind of interactive advertising. Later, the site would pioneer real-time web analytics and behavioral targeting, but bosses at HotWired started with a 468-by-60-pixel banner at the top of the main page. Fourteen advertisers had signed on for the launch, including MCI, Club Med, the now-defunct malt beverage Zima, and Volvo. Somewhere between six and 12 of the billboard-like ads appeared simultaneously that day, but it was AT&T’s that would come to be known as “the world’s first banner ad.” At the time, the telecom giant had a popular television campaign featuring the tagline, “You will,” showcasing the future that AT&T was working to bring to the masses. “Have you borrowed a book from thousands of miles away? . . . Have you ever watched the movie you wanted to, the minute you wanted to?” Tom Selleck’s voice asked in the commercials. “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here?” the candy-colored banner ad asked. “You will.” The young designers of the campaign revered the still-uncommercialized digital frontier, even if they also understood that keeping information free would require advertising. (AT&T paid a reported $20,000 to $30,000 for the spot.) “We came with the attitude that this was a sacred ground,” Joe McCambley, who worked on the ad, told Fast Company’s Rebecca Greenfield in 2014 . “The rest of advertising had been ruined and dammit, we weren’t going to let that happen this time.” [Screenshots: Craig Kanarick / thefirstbannerad.com ] Clicking on the banner, which didn’t even include the AT&T logo, led to a separate page with three links. The first led to a map of the United States labeled with clickable links to art museums and galleries that had online presences, including digital-only galleries. The second was a directory of AT&T websites, and the last led to a survey asking visitors about the ad. The idea was to help demystify this vast new Web, and make it look cool. “We really were trying to make sure the internet had beauty,” Craig Kanarick, a designer who worked on the ad, told me. “After all, nobody really knew if users would click on the banners at all and leave their experience at hotwired.com or just scroll past them and ignore them. We just wanted to make sure that if they did click, they didn’t feel like they wasted their time.” People clicked. By some accounts, after the initial excitement, the click-through rate settled at around 44%, which as a percentage is an astonishing figure. Of course, there were only about 14 million people online at that point—and only tens of thousands of people were reading HotWired. By comparison, today, in the era of ad blockers, most banner ads have a click-through rate of .08% . The first webcams [Screenshot: Archive.org ] In July 1994, Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong launched FogCam! ( fogcam.org ) at San Francisco State University to track changes in the local weather. It remains the oldest still-operating webcam in the world. (The first webcam, the Trojan room coffee pot cam at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., first came online in 1991 but was retired in 2001.) Later that summer, 24-year-old Netscape engineer named Lou Montulli debuted The Amazing FishCam ( fishcam.com ), which provided a continuous web feed of an aquarium in the Netscape headquarters. FishCam is said to be the second live camera on the web and after a few stints offline, it’s still running, though now pointed out a driveway window. “In its audacious uselessness—and that of thousands of ego trips like it—lie the seeds of the Internet revolution,” The Economist wrote at its birth. Not to diminish Montulli’s other contributions to the Web, including the ‘BLINK’ tag, HTTP proxying, and, with the release of Netscape’s browser in October 1994, the cookie . The first Congressional website Sen. Kennedy’s webpage as seen in an early version of Netscape’s browser [Screenshot: Chris Casey ] In 1993, Chris Casey was working as Senator Ted Kennedy’s systems administrator, even if he had no real technical experience beyond Kennedy’s office network of Macs. “Any Senate office that was attempting to explore and utilize this recently-heard-about ‘Internet’ thing generally had to find their own way, without any institutional help from the famously slow-to-change Senate,” Casey recalled in 2009. After well-received efforts by the office to post the Senator’s press releases and solicit public comment on BBS, Casey reached out to the White House staff who were then working on WhiteHouse.gov, and was put in touch with two MIT students who were helping that effort, John Mallery and Eric Loeb. They worked with Casey to launch Kennedy’s website in the spring of ‘94—the first for any member of Congress—on a server at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab (senate.gov provided only FTP and Gopher services at the time). Kennedy and his team also chose to include his brand-new email address, and braced themselves for a new kind of challenge that would eventually come to every Congressional office: sorting through and responding to torrents of constituents’ emails. [Screenshot: Chris Casey ] Kennedy’s Web presence wouldn’t stop there. In 1994, he faced a serious challenge for his seat by Republican Mitt Romney. Some polls even predicted his defeat. That fall, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) contracted with Issue Dynamics Inc. to help develop a basic website for each of their Senate candidates. Considering Kennedy’s online efforts, DSCC gave his campaign staff direct access to manage their campaign site and to make it their own. Launched only a few weeks prior to Election Day, the site contained issue papers, press releases, and endorsements. Fundraising “was still little more than a geeky politico’s daydream,” remembers Casey. “I was particularly proud of my use of the new ‘BLINK’ tag on the Election Day GET OUT AND VOTE! link at the top of the page.” Meanwhile, he says, Romney was nowhere to be found online and was chided in the media for it. Kennedy ended up winning handily, and a Newsweek article about digital politics later dubbed him CyberTed : “It helped counter his image as an out-of-touch baron who reeked of Old Politics. And it impressed the world of computer jocks, thousands of whom work in the important Boston branch of the industry.” It wasn’t until the year 2000 that all Senators had their own website. Casey notes that Kennedy’s online experience did more than just generate good press; it helped inform his positions on important digital issues which many of his less-savvy colleagues were ill-equipped to understand. One early example came when the Senate voted in 1995 on the Communications Decency Act, a far-overreaching effort to censor adult content on the Internet. The bill passed by a vote of 84-16, despite Kennedy’s best efforts. Two years later the Supreme Court overturned the act as unconstitutional by a unanimous vote. The first encrypted online transaction On August 11, 1994, Phil Brandenberger logged onto a new website called NetMarket and paid $12.48, plus shipping costs, for the Sting CD, Ten Summoner’s Tales . It was the first online transaction protected by encryption technology. “Even if the NSA was listening in, they couldn’t get his credit card number,” Dan Kohn, the 21-year-old entrepreneur behind NetMarket, told the New York Times .
TIL the first e-commerce transaction was on August 11, 1994 when a man named Dan Kohn sold his friend a Sting CD for $12.48 + shipping. It resulted in this NYT headline: "Attention Shoppers: Internet is Open" pic.twitter.com/XudBkmk30p — Rex Woodbury (@rex_woodbury) November 21, 2021
The idea came to Kohn while studying abroad at the London School of Economics, where he was able to remotely connect to his Swarthmore computer to check his email and read updates on Usenet. “As I was using it every day,” he told Vice’s Noisey in 2019 , “thinking about it, and also just reading a lot about business ideas and startups, it just sort of dawned on me: Why aren’t people doing commerce on this network?” Not everyone agrees on this milestone. The Internet Shopping Network, which began selling computer equipment online in 1994, beat NetMarket by about a month, the site’s former CEO told CNet in 2004 . But the Sting CD signaled the opening of a new frontier, and hinted at other world-shaking platforms to come. A month later, a young ex-hedge funder would register Relentless.com; the next year, he would change its name to Amazon.com. Netscape Navigator 1.0, released that December, pioneered the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Protocol , which established an encrypted link between browser and server. Bitcoin wouldn’t show up for at least another decade, but Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of PGP encryption, saw a glimmer of something in that first purchase. “I think it’s an important step in pioneering this work, but later on we’ll probably see more exciting things in the way of digital cash,” he told the Times, “some combination of cryptographic protocols that behave the way real dollars behave but are untraceable.” PizzaNet (and the first livestreamed concerts) [Screenshot: Alex Pasternack / OldWeb.today ] On August 22, 1994, Pizza Hut made history with PizzaNet , which allowed people to order pizza via the Web for the first time. Well, people in Santa Cruz, California. “In a revolutionary spin on business use of the Information Superhighway,” a press release declared, the pilot program let customers dispatch their information and pizza order “via the Internet back to Wichita,” where it is “then relayed via modem and conventional phone lines to the SCO Open Server system at the customer’s nearest Pizza Hut restaurant. The local restaurant can then telephone first-time users to verify orders. All money changes hand at the point of delivery.” The first order was pepperoni with mushrooms and extra cheese. News of the site—if not the site itself—sent shares of Santa Cruz-based software vendor SCO soaring. Even Silicon Graphics, the tech hardware company, saw its stock rise nearly 10% in one hour when a KCBS radio reporter mistakenly called them “the Internet pizza company.”
Later that week, a few employees at SCO made more internet history, as Deth Specula, the company band, performed in one of the first live rock concerts livestreamed over the Web . (They kicked off with their parody of the Grand Funk Railroad song “We’re An American Band,” called “Internet Band.”) The concert used the Multicast Backbone, or M-Bone , an early streaming technology by Xerox PARC that was also used that year to simulcast some of the first Web conference in Geneva, and, two months after Deth Specula’s show, the first “major” livestreamed concert : a tour stop in Dallas by the Rolling Stones. Wells Fargo [Screenshot: Wells Fargo Corporate Archives] When Wells Fargo launched its first website on December 12, 1994, becoming one of the first banks with a web presence, banking online was still a fantasy. Instead, the page functioned mostly as a marketing tool, offering access to brochures and banking products, links to history and trivia and high-resolution pictures of Wells Fargo’s iconic stagecoaches—a nod to its origins on another frontier, providing “express” delivery and banking services to California at a time when it was growing rapidly due to the Gold Rush. “Unfortunately,” notes a corporate history , “with dial-up-internet access the norm, the colorful stagecoach pictures downloaded one line at a time and took several minutes to load the whole site. Customers used the built-in feedback button to submit their frustration and disappointment with the slow speed. . . . Another common question asked by customers was: When can I check my account balance on the website?” The following year, a small task force built new security features and installed new servers to handle the volume of online activity. In May 1995, Wells Fargo became the first major bank to allow customers to access their accounts via the Web. In early 1994, as the bank worked on its first Web page, Wells Fargo executives turned to CommerceNet, an early online business directory, to try to establish a Web presence even sooner. They started by sending CD-ROMs full of photos. “They’d say, ‘Here’s like a splash screen we’d like you to put up for our first web page,'” recalled Kevin Hughes, who was helping CommerceNet with its website at the time, and who spoke to the Computer History Museum in 2010. “It was just a photo of two guys on a stagecoach saying, ‘Under construction. Be back soon.’ That was Wells Fargo’s first web presence.” Robots.txt [Screenshot: Alex Pasternack / OldWeb.today ] On July 3, 1994, Dutch software developer Martijn Koster emailed the W3C www-talk mailing list, which included Berners-Lee and all the Web’s main engineers, with a modest proposal. The rules of what they called the Robots Exclusion Protocol—developed along with a group of other web administrators and developers—would be stipulated in a robots.txt file in a website’s index folder, and would define what parts of a website robots are permitted to crawl. Koster couldn’t have known that, for decades, this little file would keep the internet from utter chaos.
