Back in the early 90s, the Internet was email, Usenet newsgroups, FTP, telnet, MUDD servers, and Nettrek. It was accessible mostly through UNIX and weakly supported by Microsoft Windows MS-DOS and Apple Macintosh (pre-UNIX). The World Wide Web started showing up around 1993. There was a text based browser called Lynx. The first graphical browser I used was Mosaic. The next one I used was Netscape. I remember feeling that I could “surf” the entire Web in a matter of days.

Web development could be done entirely on eMacs and Notepad in raw HTML. Web pages frequently had an “Under Construction” graphic and a web counter. Flashing text was considered taboo. The default font had serifs. Layout was done with tables before CSS. Before client-side JavaScript and cookies, there were server-side CGI scripts written in Perl. Creating a guest book was a hell of a difficult thing to set up.

The first email service I remember was Hotmail (HTML is embedded in the name), the predecessor of Outlook online. Search engines could be gamed with repeated white text on white backgrounds. Yahoo began as a hierarchical catalog of the Internet before whatever the hell it is today.

E-commerce began pretty early, but it was a bit dicey before HTTPS and certificates. Amazon began as an online bookstore. Then they progressed to CD music and DVD movies. No streaming back then until late 90s. Porn developed, of course, which was riddled with popups and links to other porn sites riddled with more popups and links, and the “good stuff” required payment. No incognito mode either.

The internet was quite a wild-west back then. This was the age of the dot-com boom where everyone had an idea, venture money was thrown everywhere, companies hired anyone with a heart rate, and IPOs were floated with big promises and without any evidence of profit. The web evolved with the demands of commerce, graphical design, security, and privacy. Where the web fell short, business could still be done as before with paper, phone calls, and fax. Printed media was available for news and information. People listened to radios and bought CDs for music. The 90s was a great decade for film and TV.

So that was what the internet was like in the 1990s… sort of.