Blast from the Past: When the Internet was Young

I moved 2,000 miles across the country from Columbus, Ohio to Las Vegas, Nevada almost 15 years ago. The world of 1994 dosn't seem that different from today's world at first blush. But then I start to remember a few things. My brand new computer that year was a first-generation Pentium 60. If the hard drive consisted of gigabites, they were in the single- or low-double digits.

That computer ran Microsoft Windows 3.1. Windows 95, 98, Me, XP and Vista were years away. I had recently acquired an online service called Prodigy, which was connected via phone line on a 14.4 kbps modem. Prodigy was completely text-based, with no graphics. And I quickly got hooked. But Prodigy was on the wane, and I quickly took up America Online. AOL was a self-contained online network, with 100% proprietary information. There was no "Internet" to be had there.

It wasn't long before AOL started to offer a portal to the Internet. And it didn't work very well. Netscape was the web browser of choice in that day, and Microsoft was late to the table with Internet Explorer. But it would be several more years before everybody was online. We'd never have believed you could watch streaming, HD video on your computer. Or download songs in seconds. Or play rich, detailed, online games with people all over the world. Mostly, we never imagined the porn!

Now, blogging has taken us back around to the beginning. Sure, they're prettier than the old DOS-based message boards, and we can put in YouTube videos and such, but it is sort of the same concept. Anyway, if you want to see what it was like--really not all that long ago--take a look at this video.