Internet Artifacts

Web1 (1990-early 2000s) was read-only. People consumed static webpages that they navigated to from directories like Yahoo. Web1 was built on open-source protocols like HTTP.

The Internet is now a place where everyone has an inventory.

If you were hanging around when they first started wiring computers together and you said, “One day this simple innovation is going to let people make millions of dollars selling pictures of their feet to strangers,” Al Gore would say, “please put on some shoes and get out of my office.” But that’s what the Internet did!

To use the internet in the early 1990s, you really had to know exactly what you were looking for and specifically how to search for it in the command line. In Before the Web: The Internet in 1991, ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan Nichols agreed:“The pre-Web Internet was an almost entirely text-based world...If this makes the pre-Web sound like a place tha... See more

The internet was created in 1989 with the intention that it would be completely decentralized. This means it would be owned by the people who used it. It’s a good idea in theory, but in practice, it created a poor consumer experience. You had to be highly technical to use the internet. It was largely read-only. We can call this version of the inter... See more