Well, here we are celebrating a big milestone. It was 30 years ago that “regular people” started getting on the Internet. I remember it vividly and coined the term “Summer of the Web” at the time (a riff of Soul Asylum, which for you youngsters was a popular band in the 90s). To my knowledge, no-one else has called it this.
College students were already quite familiar with the internet. I had been using it since 1991 with a shell account. That was a very different internet as everything was text-based and split across diverse protocols such as SMTP, NNTP, IRC, FTP, Archie, and Gopher. But 1995 was the year my parents, neighbors, grandparents, practically everyone started getting online and “surfing the web” as they called it back then.
1995 was a different world. If you wanted the news, you read a newspaper, watched TV, or listened to the radio. CNN offered 24 hour news, but MSNBC and Fox News wouldn’t come around for a few more years. The O.J. Simpson trial dominated both the headlines and everyone’s daily conversations.
You bought CDs of your favorite songs – or just waited for them to come on the radio. You scheduled your life around your favorite TV shows. When a hot new film opened, you bought tickets and lined up to see it in a theater. There was no downloading or streaming of music, TV, and movie content.
Sure, you could tape shows on your VCR or rent movies at Blockbuster but you always got a clearer picture by watching it live and a VHS tape on your 25″ CRT TV couldn’t hold a candle to the massive silver screens at your local cineplex.
Cell phones existed, but only drug dealers and real estate agents had them. They were bulky, unreliable, and prohibitively expensive for average Joes. Most businesses had PCs as did many individuals. But they were for word processing, spreadsheets, and games. They were far from ubiquitous and chances are your grandma did not have one… yet.
Into this world was thrust a crazy new invention – the world wide web. Invented just two years prior in 1993, the graphical browser was the “killer app” that got PCs and modems into nearly every home. Suddenly, everyone just had to have one. I’m not sure why nor do I think they knew, but the hype machine was running at 1000% (and hasn’t slowed down since).
For us techies, it was very much a mixed bag. It was nice to be able to access our internet when we went home for the summer, albeit at massively reduced bandwidth. It was kinda cool for our parents to know what we were doing all this time. But, having to be the world’s tech support was quite the pain in the rear.
It wasn’t the users’ fault – early dialup systems were a mishmash of technologies. Your computer, operating system, TCP software, browser, internet service provider (ISP), and phone company were all separate entities that had to work together. For example, to get online with Windows 3.1 you had to install Trumpet Winsock, write a script to dial up to your local ISP, install a browser, install an email client, and many other things I have forgotten over the years.
Speaking of ISPs, that was way different back then as well. The phone and cable companies were enjoying the fruits of their monopoly status and couldn’t care one iota about helping you get online. They were happy to sell a T1 to a business but (wisely) did not want to take on the support overhead of individuals with little technical experience. So, it was left to local entrepreneurs to bridge the gap.
The Serial Port has a great series on what it took to start a 90s ISP. I’ll summarize here – buy a T1 and a bunch of phone lines from the phone company, buy a slew of modems and a few servers to tie it all together. Suffice it to say that the level of service and support varied widely.
The internet was not America’s first exposure to online services. America Online (AOL), Compuserve, BIX, The Source, and Prodigy had offered nationwide online services for years. However, these were walled gardens and lacked the open nature of the internet. You paid a monthly subscription fee, paid by the hour for access, and paid additional charges for certain services. You could communicate with other users, but only users of that service.
Of this group, AOL saw the writing on the wall and embraced the internet. They allowed their users to also exchange emails with internet users, browse websites, and access other internet services alongside AOL’s native services. As a result, their subscriber-ship exploded. They catered to a less technical clientele and it really was easier to get connected with those free coastersdisks they mailed you every month.
There was of course backlash from the “real” users of the internet and @aol.com became a tag for “newbie user”. This was even referenced in Weird Al’s All About The Pentiums (“sayin’ me too like an AOLer”). I was one of those snobs, but thank God these people were using AOL otherwise I would have been taxed with even more friends and family support requests!
By the end of the summer, our parents (and later grandparents) were forwarding chain emails (in really huge print), reading The Drudge Report, and doing God knows what else on the web. It didn’t take long for online dating to become a thing. Within just a few years I was attending weddings of people who met online (people of all ages mind you). The digitization of our society was well underway.
Next would come online retailers, peer-to-peer file sharing, MP3s, GeoCities, and the dot com bubble. Then would come social media, smartphones, bitcoin, even more social media, and of course, the AI scourge that now threatens us all. Oh, did I mention porn? Yeah, it was there all along!
What a strange ride it has been – and I’m not sure we are for the better because of it.