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When I first got access to the internet, it was through a friend's dial-up shell account that I made him go get after he enrolled at the junior college. I was still in high school, so it was probably 1992 or so. This was before the web existed, so the main services you had were, like...
- email - pretty much functioned as it does today, but it was easier to spoof messages and claim to be someone else. also spam didn't really exist.
- usenet - a big-ass message board, mostly full of college kid nerds and people working at companies that somehow thought that this internet thing mattered. people were also posting binaries there back then, but since bandwidth was what it was, most of these were GIFs of people fucking. the idea of possessing an AVI of people fucking existed, but was exceptionally rare.
- gopher - I guess gopher was technically as close to the web as it got back then. it was essentially a text-based series of menus that would serve up text articles. you might connect to a gopher and get a menu like...
- About This Gopher
- Presidents
- Other World Leaders
...and so on. From there the presidents menu might dive down into "famous presidents" and "infamous presidents" or whatever. Eventually you'd read some piece of info and move on.
- archie - archie, I think, was something that crawled around gopher servers and indexed them, providing some kind of basic search experience in case you didn't know which gopher address was the one for presidents or whatever.
- FTP - there were a ton of FTP servers up. Colleges ran public ones full of open-source software and people would sneakily hide caches of bootleg games and porn and whatever else. Lists of these hidden spots would circulate, giving you a bit of time to go raid them before the list fell into the wrong hands and all the spots got wiped out. I grabbed Doom 2 off of an FTP site. it was rad.
- I guess I'll mention finger and .plan files here. You could create a little text file on your account (your ".plan") and when people at a prompt fingered your email address, it would return the contents of the file. Some people kept short ones, others appended new updates to the end and maintained it like a blog.
- lynx - lynx is a web browser built for terminal mode, text-ass text internet. html before people thought it would be cool to maybe put some images in there to spice things up. I remember this seeming like a less-organized, messier version of gopher servers, originally. but it wouldn't be long before people started logging into the internet from devices that supported graphics, and eventually NCSA Mosiac would change stuff.
- irc - chat rooms, again, mostly full of college kids who wanted to convince you they were way cooler than they probably were. "#hottub" was a popular channel for people who wanted to get spicy or whatever.
- telnet - so this is really just a way for you to remotely connect to another machine, but sometimes the machine on the other end wasn't just about bash prompt. sometimes you'd get big, custom bulletin boards or multiplayer text adventures or... yeah. wide variety of stuff.
That's kinda it. None of it was commercialized and the very idea of typing a credit card number into a computer seemed like the worst idea in the world. It wouldn't take long, at that point, for people to start trying to make money off of it one way or another. For one, people started running commercial ISPs and selling subscriptions to shell accounts. The admin of the junior college's dial-up service eventually left and started up sonic.net, which was great because they had the phone/modem capacity to allow more than one person log in at a time.
When I started working at a magazine in 1994, I saw the web on a Mac for the first time and was pretty blown away, but there wasn't much to look at. That live image of the coffee pot was online and that was a real winner. But even then, the commercial opportunities didn't really exist. Companies were starting to get their own .com domains and all that, but no one was really sure what to do with them.
When I started working at a video game website in 1996, the idea of a magazine on the web, something that would actually be commercial in nature and try to make money through advertising, seemed dicey, but they had a sales team and it seemed like it was going OK. Even then, the idea of buying something online seemed weird. I think I might've mailed someone some cash for some video tapes at one point.
Now it kinda feels like the core of the internet is completely falling apart as every major commercial service woke up one morning and said "wait, we can't just run at a loss forever under the guise of building an audience?" And all of those commercial services--Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, Google, whatever--are just getting worse all the time. I think there are any number of reasons you could point to here, from people too narrowminded to think about the big picture of their products to just, ya know, capitalism doing what it does.
I don't really have some glossy-eyed optimism here. I think anyone out there peddling some kind of "THIS MEANS THE INTERNET WILL ONCE AGAIN BELONG TO ITS USERS" is just lying to themselves. But it does provide this weird opportunity to figure out what's next and those solutions don't have to be so wrapped up in the archetypes of the recent past. I do think that the solutions probably need to be rooted in figuring out what people actually want to do online, though, rather than just some technology thing that excites some engineer somewhere.
Might have more to say about this later, gotta bring in groceries.
