7 ms·

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet w

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

Aloisius 13y ago
I don't know about the OP, but in 1994, I was mostly using Webcrawler as my search engine. Lycos came out around then too. Switched to Altavista pretty quickly after it came out.
drcube 13y ago
I didn't have a computer at the time, but my friends who were online all used AOL, which came with its own search engine, chat rooms, email, etc.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
In context, I was part of the group that would eventually become the Java group (at that time it had transitioned from being the Oak group to being the 'Liveoak' group[1]) Patrick Chan had written a web spider in Java, we marvelled that it seemed like it could visit every site on the web over night :-) But mostly what it found were the 'big' web sites (computer companies, early movers in the Internet space) and students who had downloaded X-mosaic and the httpd from CERN and were playing around with early HTML. [1] The name was a somewhat morbid joke on James Gosling's part as Sun was cancelling the Java project at the end of the fiscal year and had been split into the "part that the hardware guys liked" (Sun Interactive) and "the part no one knew what to do with." (Liveoak)
bcRIPster 13y ago
In 1994, the main way you found websites was mostly from hub sites that maintained large libraries of links to other sites (like a directory), newsgroups (UUCP/Usenet), friends in IRC trading links, AOL, Delphi and Compuserve forums and print magazines. Webcrawler was revolutionary when it came on-line in 1994, but there were no comprehensive search engines that had a high index count until probably 1996. The mother of all link directories started from NCSA who distributed the first web browser (Mosaic) and they ran a site where they would publish a monthly list of "What's New" on the web. They pulled the pages from their site a few years ago but fortunately I made a mirror on my server for historical reference that you can check out here: http://www.kitchencloset.com/realstuff/ncsa/whats_new-archive/ http://www.kitchencloset.com/realstuff/ncsa/whats_new-archiv... Enjoy! edit: forgot to mention web rings someone else just mentioned.
- Torgo 13y ago
  I remember circa-1994/1995, our library got a book called something like "World Wide Web Yellow Pages" and it was a printed book of a couple hundred pages of curated web URLs. Even then the irony was not lost on me. Why didn't they just put it online? The answer was, well, then how would you find that?
- chebucto 13y ago
  Many sites, including most home pages (remember those?) had a page of links, a small curated set of links[1]. Ooh, and guestbooks! Thousands and thousands of guestbooks! [1] http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011955/http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Dungeon/1350/links.html http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011955/http://www.geociti...
- elleferrer 13y ago
  Mosaic, totally remember those WorldWideWeb days.
petercooper 13y ago
Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.
- euxneks 13y ago
  ah.. web rings.. I remember babylon 5 web rings... Nostalgia's a hell of a thing.
  - mickeyp 13y ago
    Web Rings were amazing though; found a great site about X-Files plot theories? -- no problem, chances are you'd find more that were like that by following the web ring. We lost something back then that, even today, we never really got back...
  - visarga 13y ago
    If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search. By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      Search was actually anticipated (along with social graphs) by TBL in his first WWW proposal documents, posted to HN a few months back.
teh_klev 13y ago
Back in the day you bought magazines like ".NET" (a UK publication) that told you where the hotspots were on the web. There were other physical publications like the "Internet White Pages" or some such thing (no seriously) which I remember seeing in UK bookshops and thinking "that's gonna be outa date in a week or two". Back then you felt you could contain all of the websites (or pointer sites) in your head. It was truly an exciting and exploratory time. Oh and I forgot, using KA9Q [1] for your TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.1, because Microsoft had't quite caught up at that point. And hacking the UK's PSS network to find your way into a university that was connected so you could access usenet. And the early days of Demon Internet in the UK....oh the nostalgia of it all :) [1]: http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/ http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/
- thejosh 13y ago
  Ah yes, you are probably referring to the Internet Yellow Pages[1], use to be one of my favourite things to use at a library and write down websites.. http://i.imgur.com/1n6mH4N.jpg http://i.imgur.com/1n6mH4N.jpg
  - teh_klev 13y ago
    That one as well. But there was also "The 1994 Internet White Pages" published by Wiley Press which is credited with Seth Godin as a co-author [1][2]. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/HxDWs9c.jpg http://i.imgur.com/HxDWs9c.jpg [2]: http://amzn.com/1568843003 http://amzn.com/1568843003
jon_dahl 13y ago
Quick answer: links. Hypertext. It's important enough to the original vision of this whole contraption to actually be the name. While were reminiscing... In 1994, the web felt like technology. You typed in "http://" http://" and it felt exotic. You were connecting to a server. Literally: _a_ server. You wondered what would happen if you hit the same address with gopher or (more likely) telnet. As often as not, something would happen.

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

Aloisius 13y ago

I don't know about the OP, but in 1994, I was mostly using Webcrawler as my search engine. Lycos came out around then too. Switched to Altavista pretty quickly after it came out.

drcube 13y ago

I didn't have a computer at the time, but my friends who were online all used AOL, which came with its own search engine, chat rooms, email, etc.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

In context, I was part of the group that would eventually become the Java group (at that time it had transitioned from being the Oak group to being the 'Liveoak' group[1]) Patrick Chan had written a web spider in Java, we marvelled that it seemed like it could visit every site on the web over night :-) But mostly what it found were the 'big' web sites (computer companies, early movers in the Internet space) and students who had downloaded X-mosaic and the httpd from CERN and were playing around with early HTML. [1] The name was a somewhat morbid joke on James Gosling's part as Sun was cancelling the Java project at the end of the fiscal year and had been split into the "part that the hardware guys liked" (Sun Interactive) and "the part no one knew what to do with." (Liveoak)

bcRIPster 13y ago

In 1994, the main way you found websites was mostly from hub sites that maintained large libraries of links to other sites (like a directory), newsgroups (UUCP/Usenet), friends in IRC trading links, AOL, Delphi and Compuserve forums and print magazines. Webcrawler was revolutionary when it came on-line in 1994, but there were no comprehensive search engines that had a high index count until probably 1996. The mother of all link directories started from NCSA who distributed the first web browser (Mosaic) and they ran a site where they would publish a monthly list of "What's New" on the web. They pulled the pages from their site a few years ago but fortunately I made a mirror on my server for historical reference that you can check out here: http://www.kitchencloset.com/realstuff/ncsa/whats_new-archive/ http://www.kitchencloset.com/realstuff/ncsa/whats_new-archiv... Enjoy! edit: forgot to mention web rings someone else just mentioned.

Torgo 13y ago
I remember circa-1994/1995, our library got a book called something like "World Wide Web Yellow Pages" and it was a printed book of a couple hundred pages of curated web URLs. Even then the irony was not lost on me. Why didn't they just put it online? The answer was, well, then how would you find that?
chebucto 13y ago
Many sites, including most home pages (remember those?) had a page of links, a small curated set of links[1]. Ooh, and guestbooks! Thousands and thousands of guestbooks! [1] http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011955/http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Dungeon/1350/links.html http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011955/http://www.geociti...
elleferrer 13y ago
Mosaic, totally remember those WorldWideWeb days.

petercooper 13y ago

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.

euxneks 13y ago
ah.. web rings.. I remember babylon 5 web rings... Nostalgia's a hell of a thing.
- mickeyp 13y ago
  Web Rings were amazing though; found a great site about X-Files plot theories? -- no problem, chances are you'd find more that were like that by following the web ring. We lost something back then that, even today, we never really got back...
- visarga 13y ago
  If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search. By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Search was actually anticipated (along with social graphs) by TBL in his first WWW proposal documents, posted to HN a few months back.

teh_klev 13y ago

Back in the day you bought magazines like ".NET" (a UK publication) that told you where the hotspots were on the web. There were other physical publications like the "Internet White Pages" or some such thing (no seriously) which I remember seeing in UK bookshops and thinking "that's gonna be outa date in a week or two". Back then you felt you could contain all of the websites (or pointer sites) in your head. It was truly an exciting and exploratory time. Oh and I forgot, using KA9Q [1] for your TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.1, because Microsoft had't quite caught up at that point. And hacking the UK's PSS network to find your way into a university that was connected so you could access usenet. And the early days of Demon Internet in the UK....oh the nostalgia of it all :) [1]: http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/ http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/

thejosh 13y ago
Ah yes, you are probably referring to the Internet Yellow Pages[1], use to be one of my favourite things to use at a library and write down websites.. http://i.imgur.com/1n6mH4N.jpg http://i.imgur.com/1n6mH4N.jpg
- teh_klev 13y ago
  That one as well. But there was also "The 1994 Internet White Pages" published by Wiley Press which is credited with Seth Godin as a co-author [1][2]. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/HxDWs9c.jpg http://i.imgur.com/HxDWs9c.jpg [2]: http://amzn.com/1568843003 http://amzn.com/1568843003

jon_dahl 13y ago

Quick answer: links. Hypertext. It's important enough to the original vision of this whole contraption to actually be the name. While were reminiscing... In 1994, the web felt like technology. You typed in "http://" http://" and it felt exotic. You were connecting to a server. Literally: _a_ server. You wondered what would happen if you hit the same address with gopher or (more likely) telnet. As often as not, something would happen.