That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.
Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.
Even after Altavista was clearly better than Yahoo for ad-hoc searches, I still used Yahoo a lot because their topic hierarchy was a really great way to sit down and learn about some topic and its sub-topics.
I was particularly keen on this while eating because you could browse the web with just the mouse very easily.
>There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.
When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley.
I now feel like a guy who grew up during the 1950's when you tell kids, "Yeah, the internet wasn't always about Reddit and Porn kiddies."
Implying we should 'fix' Eternal September is pretty close to implying we should keep important technology out of the hands of those the current users deem unworthy. That prevents both spam and the Arab Spring, both 4chan and Wikileaks.
Keeping the Internet as it was prior to 1991, when commercial access was first allowed, means keeping it a small, controlled entity with obvious choke points that make it trivial to censor or kill entirely. It largely prevents its use for social or political change other than the kinds of change its owners want to see. It would trivialize the Internet by relegating it to a tiny fraction of its current usefulness.
It's easy to idealize what we had. However, losing sight of what we have now, and what we could have, is actively harmful to the prospect of future moral growth.
> Implying we should 'fix' Eternal September is pretty close to implying we should keep important technology out of the hands of those the current users deem unworthy. That prevents both spam and the Arab Spring, both 4chan and Wikileaks.
Not necessarily. The holy grail is growth where culture is preserved, i.e. the rate of acquisition of new users is below the point where they overwhelm the culture.
New users acculturate over time and exposure, so you can roughly model it as "at any time, no more than x% of the users should be 'new'".
That's still exponential growth, so it needn't be elitest. In time, you'll still get to everyone who wants in.
I completely disagree with your statement. Maybe there is a bigger question: 'Is crossing the chasm to widespread adoption always a good thing?' Maybe we should be trying to build platforms that are high-quality instead of high-quantity. We are caught in a world that is obsessed with inclusion rather than exclusion. Is that, by necessity, the default position? Should it be?
The internet contributed to building support for the Arab Spring throughout the world but it was tyrannical regimes that were the root cause. Wikileaks is not new. We used to have a little thing called 'investigative journalism', a profession in which people would put their live's on the line to reveal scandals and uncover secrets they felt the world should have known.
Technology does not motivate moral growth. People motivate moral growth. Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world when they invaded Poland and set the course for World War II.
The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
I don't know - you can try to be inclusive and also set some standards. That doesn't have to be for the entire Internet.
The future people will have fun comparing and contrasting different reputation systems and online communities. Assuming enough information stays for them to study.
Usenet was archived by Deja, which got bought by Google. It's in a sorry state, but at least it's stil there.
Who's archiving Reddit, or HN, or 4chan, or all the rest?
I agree with your argument. But I think the internet's strongest trait is not necessarily revolutionary changes (wikileaks and arab spring). The things that have been built on the internet have been incredible. Think of crowdsourced projects like wikipedia and how ridiculously trivial it is for a scientist (or someone like me; a student in a lab) to access information or search for experimental data (genes are the tip of the iceberg here).
I don't want to belittle the Arab Spring, but the NCBI database and Wikipedia have arguably had an even larger impact on society than social networking's capability for kickstarting revolution. It's just slower and less obvious.
I was at a computer camp sometime around '94, and the camp had a printed "Directory of web pages" which was exactly like the yellow pages of the phone book. You would look up a subject, and it had a printed list of urls on that subject.
I still have a copy of "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" published by O'Reilly in 1992. It has a whole section devoted to lists of addresses of sites grouped by subject. Many of the sites didn't have urls because they were operating over ftp or telnet or WAIS or Gopher.
I just checked and the terms "google", "altavista", and "search engine" do not appear anywhere in the index. Also, no weird web2.0-style domain names.
The sheer amount of information back then was nothing compared to what it was today, but it was so much easier to browse around. Something as trivial as a webring was a cement for a community rather than a pledge for traffic.
Despite the nostalgia, I do think that, overall, the WWW experience has mostly gotten better since then, if only for the amount of information and communication. However, the density of quality has rather shrunk...
If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search.
By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
Web Rings were amazing though; found a great site about X-Files plot theories? -- no problem, chances are you'd find more that were like that by following the web ring. We lost something back then that, even today, we never really got back...
Does anyone know why altavista.com and altavista.digital.com were different? I just remember preferring the digital.com version for some reason.
I wish I could go back in time to 1996... everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful, not to mention textual (because images took so long to download).
> everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful
Back then it almost felt like we were in the heroic age of internet communities, to borrow a phrase used about a period of American inventors. It'll never be like that again, but there are more good things coming in the future.
Web pages were static, many were long-form, they tended to provide information, and link copiously to one another.
What they lacked was collaborative editing, though Ward Cunningham was already working on that at the time. Wikis postdated the Web only by a brief bit.
Back in the day you bought magazines like ".NET" (a UK publication) that told you where the hotspots were on the web.
There were other physical publications like the "Internet White Pages" or some such thing (no seriously) which I remember seeing in UK bookshops and thinking "that's gonna be outa date in a week or two".
Back then you felt you could contain all of the websites (or pointer sites) in your head. It was truly an exciting and exploratory time.
Oh and I forgot, using KA9Q [1] for your TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.1, because Microsoft had't quite caught up at that point. And hacking the UK's PSS network to find your way into a university that was connected so you could access usenet. And the early days of Demon Internet in the UK....oh the nostalgia of it all :)
In 1994, the main way you found websites was mostly from hub sites that maintained large libraries of links to other sites (like a directory), newsgroups (UUCP/Usenet), friends in IRC trading links, AOL, Delphi and Compuserve forums and print magazines. Webcrawler was revolutionary when it came on-line in 1994, but there were no comprehensive search engines that had a high index count until probably 1996.
The mother of all link directories started from NCSA who distributed the first web browser (Mosaic) and they ran a site where they would publish a monthly list of "What's New" on the web. They pulled the pages from their site a few years ago but fortunately I made a mirror on my server for historical reference that you can check out here:
I remember circa-1994/1995, our library got a book called something like "World Wide Web Yellow Pages" and it was a printed book of a couple hundred pages of curated web URLs. Even then the irony was not lost on me. Why didn't they just put it online? The answer was, well, then how would you find that?
Many sites, including most home pages (remember those?) had a page of links, a small curated set of links[1]. Ooh, and guestbooks! Thousands and thousands of guestbooks!
In context, I was part of the group that would eventually become the Java group (at that time it had transitioned from being the Oak group to being the 'Liveoak' group[1]) Patrick Chan had written a web spider in Java, we marvelled that it seemed like it could visit every site on the web over night :-) But mostly what it found were the 'big' web sites (computer companies, early movers in the Internet space) and students who had downloaded X-mosaic and the httpd from CERN and were playing around with early HTML.
[1] The name was a somewhat morbid joke on James Gosling's part as Sun was cancelling the Java project at the end of the fiscal year and had been split into the "part that the hardware guys liked" (Sun Interactive) and "the part no one knew what to do with." (Liveoak)
I don't know about the OP, but in 1994, I was mostly using Webcrawler as my search engine. Lycos came out around then too. Switched to Altavista pretty quickly after it came out.
Quick answer: links. Hypertext. It's important enough to the original vision of this whole contraption to actually be the name.
While were reminiscing... In 1994, the web felt like technology. You typed in "http://" and it felt exotic. You were connecting to a server. Literally: _a_ server. You wondered what would happen if you hit the same address with gopher or (more likely) telnet.
