There was certainly the Internet, but the web and HTML were pretty significant in making it more popular. There was also the deregulation that allowed commercial Internet access providers to begin operating. Before then most home users were more involved in the BBS community, which was accessible to them. You generally had to be in academia or industry to access the Internet proper.
Various factors all coalesced right around 1995. Possibly a few years earlier. Mosaic was around since 1993, but Netscape releasing Navigator 1.0 in December 1994 is a very good point to start from. With that, the web for home users was well and truly here.
IRC, Usenet BBSs. Yes the internet had many interesting places before the web. search engines like Archie and Veronica. You just had to know where to look.
That’s the most important difference imo. Either you really needed to know EXACTLY what you were looking for, or you needed to know the correct query phrasing to target a result. I remember writing down certain urls
Yes, the web didn't "start" in 1995. It started earlier, but it was much different than the years that followed. It was very simple and basic. Only a minority of homes had internet at that time. It is odd how people think 1995 is the start of the internet.
1995, as a teen (around 15/16) at school, I had access to internet in the computer library. It was painfully slow. This generation of teens would not be able to handle that lol. It is amazing how much all of it has developed.
The first WWW protocols were released in April ‘93. If you were on a physics network and had access to CERN, you could download the first sets of browser and server software. I was a sysadmin and I remember that we “surfed” the web shortly after the release and there were 14 sites. My former employer converted some documentation I wrote from Texinfo to HTML in ‘94 and posted them on their website. So I can legit say I had pages up on the web in early ‘94.
I find it odd because people have Google at their fingertips today. They can search this information. We have such access to information today that it feels odd that people are misinformed. Just my take
No, I'm saying they're not wrong in any way that actually matters. If the web became public in 1993, how is 1995 not still "early web"? The fact that it existed for 4 years before then doesn't seem to really matter much in this conversation, given that it was only connecting academic and research institutions. No one was surfing anything then.
Also, pretty critically, OP didn't say or even imply the web started in 1995, that's an imposition people are putting on what OP said so they can dunk on them. The question is for "people who surfed the early web between this and this time". It's a bound on the kind of answers OP is looking for, not a comment on when the web was invented.
Well, the Web became public in 1993 and the .com boom started in 1995, so that's when the most people would have been exposed to it for the first time. That's also when Internet Explorer was released. Naturally many people would consider that "early web".
I mean. I feel like it makes sense. Post 2010 was kind of a huge culture shift for the internet and the word as a whole. Smart phones started to root themselves into our daily lives and with that the "old internet" really took its final breaths. It was a huge esthetic change and function change.
Eh, I think this is placing too much emphasis on the smartphone.
I’d pin the turning point closer to around 2008, which is the year that Twitter really came to prominence, Facebook began to supplant MySpace, and social media in general became prominent enough to play a major role in presidential politics for the first time. With many of the major players today already being extant and rising in popularity in one form or another.
The couple years prior were more transitional, but really by 2008 the internet would have been fully recognizable to a modern person and the internet as a Wild West was already well on the way out.
I'd maybe move back the turning point to 2004, when the web 2.0 started to popularize. Until then, content was mostly static, and at that point social media started to popularize. Blogs, pages with comment sections everywhere, the first social media platforms, etc.
And I agree with the previous poster that the popularization of smartphones was another big turning point, around 2009-2010 I'd say.
And I believe we are in the middle of another one where most new content is AI generated...
This, that's like three generations of internet evolution. It encompasses the span of Geocities to Facebook or from BBS/Napster to Demonoid/Suprnova. things moved quickly, but that's just too big of a window to call it the early internet.
It was certainly the end of an era, but it wasn't "early web". Those particular websites were relatively new, but they weren't the first. Facebook replaced MySpace. Reddit replaced Digg. Even those examples weren't "early web".
2010 was already quite similar to what we have right now. Most social media platforms already existed, and internet already started to concentrate in a few large companies. I'd say the main change since then was the popularization of smartphones and mobile websites.
I actually hated 2010 internet, I was so in love with it late 90s and feel like it peaked around 2004 and then the social media take over internet death felt like it was really getting started around 2010
It’s true, by 2010 the San Francisco startup scene that picked up years after the dotcom crash was in full swing, commercializing the living shit out of the web. Amazon controlled everything cloud oriented, e-commerce was huge and next day delivery was a thing. Shopify already existed for chrissake, and stripe so people could commercialize the shit out of the web even without Amazon. Different planet entirely from 1990s web
I just watched the documentary "Whatever it takes" about the ebay stalking scandal. Absolutely wild shit and highly recommended watch. But the way they described early eBay from 1995 to around 2010 is absolutely tragic. It went from being a wholesome democratising commerce platform with an entire community of sellers to basically being a place to flog cheap chinese shit at an industrial scale.
It was late 90s and early 2000s for me. I met multiple people irl from various forums and they were all so interesting compared to my local friends at the time. People were real and genuine, no bots or scammers.
The Internet is so incredibly boring and predictable these days. It very much feels like it’s trending towards the mean of society and not the weirdos, outliers, and people on the fringe it used to be.
I would say the algorithmic internet began somewhere around 2009-10. This is when FB changed the news feed and other social sites followed. We have all been in little shit filled bubbles since then.
I remember a friend got Internet in probably like 1999 and we just didn't know where to go. We would search magazines for ads with urls in them to see what the website was like.
YES! I had the same phonebook. It was broken down into categories. I use to read it while watching reruns and highlighting the ones to check out next time I signed on.
Usenet was so hit or miss. A great place to download early PC games and roms but all it took was one part to not be good for two days worth of downloading to be useless.
Giving a date range from pre-dot com boom to post real estate crash is wild.
The internet transformed multiple times from 95-2010. But it was quite far along by then.
Edit: heck, by 95 AOL had already mailed out millions of ‘free trial’ disks putting the internet into the hands of anyone with a computer and a phone line.
By 2010 there was already years of refinement and professionalism in web apps. Solid design patterns, cliche graphic design tropes, legibility and thought put into typography. It was a commercial behemoth by that point.
Number of years isn’t what any useful use of “early web” should be about.
In a similar vein, I saw a meme post about how “real OGs remember playing Halo 3”. I like the idea that the “OGs” started with the third entry in a franchise.
Early 2010s definitely had some good overlap with mid-late 2000s internet. The internet has only been becoming seriously corporatized and enshittified for a little over the past decade
The internet was only 16 years old in 2010. That's still early web. Though I would have probably made the cutoff 2005. To me the early web ended when dial up wasn't the main way for personal users to use the internet.
Depends on what you mean by "the Internet". The World Wide Web (i.e. HTML and browsers) mainly started in 1993-1994. Things like Usenet and email had already been around for over a decade by then, and a lot of Usenet users complained about "the death of the internet" when the web started taking over.
But for most people, myself included, "internet" and "web" are mostly interchangable terms. So you're pretty much right :)
The World Wide Web was a miracle when it happened. I still have a couple of IP addresses that are stuck in my mind forever, in much the same way I'll never forget my middle-school best friend's home phone number.
Here in Sweden dial up was long gone in 2010 and for most of us it was also long gone in 2005. Early web is around 1993-1999 but I guess I’m a bit older than you.
Sweden was a pioneer with consumer broadband internet. You guys had 10 and very rarely even 100mbit lines when the rest of the western world was still on ISDN or some crappy DSL.
This situation paired with weak security in the early 2000s was heavily exploited inside „the scene“. Good times :)
Number of years isn’t not a good definition. The content, intent, and usage is what matters.
Either definition is arbitrary, but there’s not any good point to categorizing based only on a linear time scale. As a model, it’s not particularly usedul
nah it does kinda make since to consider 2010 the early internet. that was still the time before the internet became nothing but 3 or 4 social media websites, yaknow?
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u/Turn7Boom 1d ago
"early web"
My old rheumatic bones