Jurassic Web

theodp writes "It wasn't so long ago, but Slate's Farhad Manjoo notes that The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today. No YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, Gawker, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. In 1996, Americans with Internet access spent fewer than 30 minutes a month surfing the Web and were paying for the Internet by the hour. Today, Nielsen says we spend about 27 hours a month online (present company excepted, of course!)." I thought in 1996 all we did was idle in IRC channels while we wrote code in other terminals.

Comments

Re:IMDB was up

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, GeoCities existed then, and even scarier is: it still does.

Re:1996 nothing...

[WillAdams]

Spyglass corporation's Mosaic was licensed by a company called Microsoft as the basis for a browser which they named Internet Explorer --- Spyglass had an absolutely fantastic deal where they got royalties on _every sale_ of the browser.

William

Ugh

[sean_nestor]

It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you areâ""Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

I can't believe I read this and immediately thought "...but AOL didn't allow screen names over 10 characters until 1999..."

I'm a loser.

Re:No Huffie Post!?! Oh My GOSH!!!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

News flash: amateur astronomers are nerds, as are geologists and peleontologists. You can hardly do any of thet that without going outside.

Uh, yes you can:
astronomers: Bedroom window
geologists and paleontologists: Hole in the basement floor