In 1994 it would have been common for people to be using the internet and not using the web at all. Email, Usenet and FTP were common, while the web was still something of a novelty.
It was also an era where Windows and other desktops were still fairly new themselves, and some people were still just using DOS and maybe dialling into Unix machines.
My memory of the internet in 1994 is of the mysterious place where my Dad would download shareware games for me while he was at work. I wonder now if that would have been from the early web (he worked at a government scientific research institution, so would have had access) or from Usenet.
I took a course at the library circa 1995 which showed off Netscape 1.1
I once owned and operated gsd.net which was Golden Shepard Dog but that lady didn’t pay the bill so we tried something different with it. Which didn’t really work out, but I thought was “cooler” than tucows.net at the time
We did a lot with text based Unix browsers then, you could view source, run from a terminal, and never crash
irc was always with BitchX until that dev stopped updating and many bugs were found
No one really cares, you could crash a win95 box by just flooding it with udp packets, if you had a cable modem , network neighborhood truly displayed the whole neighborhood
Now we fight over peering agreements and cloud flare protections. The internet became commercialized, but we always knew it would. Disney.com was by far the coolest website I ever saw in the 90s. We just didnt expect all the ads and pop ups. That being said I got $35 out of AllAdvantage before they tanked
I remember being offered the option of a day out of the OR teaching anesthesiology residents so I could attend a tutorial conducted by UVA medical librarians to teach us researcher/academics how to do our own Medline searches.
This was around 1994-95.
What a waste. Totally confusing, frustrating, and boring. After an hour or so I wished I'd just stayed in the OR.
Never did conduct my own Medline searches, BTW: why not let paid experts like the librarians do it rather than waste my time to get a much inferior result?
I think it means that the majority of humans spend an absorbant amount of time on web and even tho it is extremely bloated and flooded with advertisement and bots, we still continue to use it
This article is a real throwback. I first started on Compuserve in the late 1980'a. Then used Prodigy. I started using the internet in 1991 on a regular basis. Mainly email, Usenet and FTP. Soon after started using the early web browsers. I started my first web page in 1994.
After scrolling for a little I was shown a video ad and was left with the text taking about 1/3rd of my phone's screen. No thank you. I wish I could flag this for unusable.
It was also an era where Windows and other desktops were still fairly new themselves, and some people were still just using DOS and maybe dialling into Unix machines.