Can you believe it? It’s been twenty years since the web rolled out. I was surfing the internet before there was a graphical interface, and I went to BBSs before that. Everything was done by command line and it was exhilarating to be able to find info from all around the world. Gopher servers and WAIS were fascinating to me. Spent a lot of time on USENET, remember that? Didn’t think so…
A couple of years after I was out of college, I was over at a friend’s house and saw my first actual web site. It was a search portal called Web Crawler. I later found Lycos. I was hooked all over again. All own this was done over dial up of course, so sites were pretty rudimentary. There are still a few relics live on the web from that time period. Check out the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics page from 1997.
It should load pretty fast since there really isn’t much to it. Can you believe how that looks? That was pretty common. Text, some colors, hey it was all new and we lapped it up! We’ve come a long way in 20 years, let’s see what the next 20 bring us!