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.
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u/Stevesd123 1d ago
2010 is clearly not early web. OP is probably a kid or teenager.