Have you ever wondered what the web used to look like long before the browser wars? Today, another developer in my office reminded me of how we used to see the web twenty years ago. Back then, Google hadn’t been envisioned yet and Yahoo! was just a couple hundred or so links indexed by hand. And Yahoo! wasn’t Yahoo!. It was still just “Jerry’s guide to the world wide web” at the time. The Internet was barely in use and mostly just within the walls of colleges and universities. This, my friends, was the World Wide Web in 1994.
Today’s Yahoo! in 1993′s Lynx Browser
It was just text and not many sites to browse, but my college lunch hours were spent happily discovering content from around the world. As great as it was, I was elated to welcome the SLIP and PPP connections that joined forces with the first graphical browsers so offer a WWW with images and that I could browse with a mouse. Yahoo quickly became much easier to use.
Yahoo! in 1994 in Netscape
As you’re aware, we’ve come a long way since then. We watch videos, search billions of web pages in an instant, share photos and listen to music, not only from feature-rich web browsers at our desks, but also from our phones. It’s amazing how far we’ve come and leaves me optimistic for what the future of web technology holds.
Yahoo! Today in Chrome
Do you remember your first time online. Get nostalgic and comment below with your first internet experience. What site (or news group, for that matter) was it and when? Better yet, click the Facebook share button below and include your story.