what was it like when the internet first came out?

[Becky]

the person who can descriptively describe what is was like to first use/see the internet get the best answer. I'm 15 and have lived with internet all my life and couldn't possibly know what it must have been like for something so awesome/convinient to come into existance! [sp] Just curious :] lemme know what it must have been/felt like! (idk what category this question would fit in, lol)

 

[parrotjohn2001]

I can recall the first days of the web. It was around 1993 or 1994, and the web was just starting to get off the ground. A lot of the early websites were either government sites or news sites -- but it was cool, because you could see news from different places, with different perspectives on things (stuff the US news media would never show).

There had been bulletin board systems before, starting in the mid 1980s, where people could post messages and communication -- kind of the fore-runners of blogs today.

The big thing about the Internet was you could send pictures for the first time. Before that, everything had been textual.

I'm not sure at first that people realized the Internet would become as huge as it has become. The first presidential race where it made a difference was probably 2000; Howard Dean used it effectively (but not enough) in 2004; Obama took many of the lessons of 2004 and really became the first Internet President.

I can recall when I thought: "The Internet has arrived." It was in 1999, at the WTO protests in Seattle, Washington. The students were linked arm in arm, facing the cops, and chanting "The whole world is watching" (a slogan from the 1960s). And there were two guys (computer geeks; Seattle, right?) who had a laptop with a camera and they were direct streaming the video from the streets on-line.
And I thought "The whole world can watch... in their living room, on their computer."

As to category, I guess the internet is now part of history, so this is as good a place as any. I think Answers has a computer/technology section -- you might ask there too.

 

[parrotjohn2001]

I can recall the first days of the web. It was around 1993 or 1994, and the web was just starting to get off the ground. A lot of the early websites were either government sites or news sites -- but it was cool, because you could see news from different places, with different perspectives on things (stuff the US news media would never show).

There had been bulletin board systems before, starting in the mid 1980s, where people could post messages and communication -- kind of the fore-runners of blogs today.

The big thing about the Internet was you could send pictures for the first time. Before that, everything had been textual.

I'm not sure at first that people realized the Internet would become as huge as it has become. The first presidential race where it made a difference was probably 2000; Howard Dean used it effectively (but not enough) in 2004; Obama took many of the lessons of 2004 and really became the first Internet President.

I can recall when I thought: "The Internet has arrived." It was in 1999, at the WTO protests in Seattle, Washington. The students were linked arm in arm, facing the cops, and chanting "The whole world is watching" (a slogan from the 1960s). And there were two guys (computer geeks; Seattle, right?) who had a laptop with a camera and they were direct streaming the video from the streets on-line.
And I thought "The whole world can watch... in their living room, on their computer."

As to category, I guess the internet is now part of history, so this is as good a place as any. I think Answers has a computer/technology section -- you might ask there too.

 

[Ezekiel]

I believe originally it was just an international network of a few select corporate/educational institute/gov't computers. Mostly protocol development in those days, so the computers could talk to each other better. I believe someone decided it'd be great if he could work on that network from home, and the idea of individual homes being able to use that INTERnational NETwork grew from there.
Then someone figured there oughtta be a standard language spoken by computers on the internet (we had them speaking well to each other, just not always in the same 'language'), so that when we sent stuff we could send understandable instructions on how it should be displayed as well. That way everyone was (at least sort of) looking at it all shown in the same way. The birth of markup, and ultimately HTML.
I think Google has an archive of its home page from back in the day. Yahoo too I think. It was the same in many ways, much less pretty, less useful and kinda harder to get around on.