The BBC News website was actually a relative latecomer - an early variant of the platform was used for the May 1997 general election (parts still online at http

The BBC News website was actually a relative latecomer - an early variant of the platform was used for the May 1997 general election (parts still online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/ ) and reused for the coverage of the death of Princess Diana that August, but the full service didn't go live until the end of the year. I agree that a lot of this nostalgia is unrealistically misty-eyed. The window during which independent sites ruled the web was extremely narrow, essentially the time between the release of NCSA Mosaic 2 and the launch of Hotwired. Consumer internet hype took off from the beginning of 1995, and by the end of that year the web was already overwhelmingly commercialised.