It’s now been 30 years since the internet and the world wide web undeniably entered mainstream consciousness.
A remarkable variety of digital mainstays trace their emergence to 1995, an innovative time crucial to the content and character of the digital landscape. In July 1995, Amazon.com began selling books online, although few noticed. The online dating service Match.com got started in 1995. So, too, did the predecessors of Craigslist and eBay.
CNN.com was launched in 1995. The New York Times offered a “special on-line report” in October 1995 during the visit pf Pope John Paul II to the U.S. It was a toe-dipping exercise for the newspaper, which went online in January 1996 as “The New York Times on the Web.”
Hints of social media were apparent in 1995 too, notably with the launch of Classmates.com, which digitized yearbooks and reconnected high school friends long after their graduation.
Online streaming became a fledgling reality in early September 1995, when a major league baseball game between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees was broadcast live online, using RealAudio technology. A writer for the Los Angeles Times complained that the audio quality was not “great,” and noted that although “Internet users all over the world had access to the broadcast, the system was only able to accommodate several hundred of them at a time.”
Still, he added, it was “a thrill to listen to play-by-play of the first major league baseball cybercast.”
No event highlighted the commercial potential of the online world as vividly as the IPO, or initial public offering, in August 1995 of Netscape Communications, maker of the first widely popular web browser, Netscape Navigator.
Demand for Netscape shares was so heavy that an order imbalance kept the stock, which traded on the Nasdaq exchange, from being traded for nearly two hours. When it finally opened, Netscape was priced at $71 per share. It climbed as high as $74.75 a share before settling at day’s end at $58.25.
It was a stunning debut for a California startup that hadn’t turned a profit in the 16 months since its founding. Netscape’s principals — including Mark Andreessen, now a Silicon Valley entrepreneur — made fortunes. In time, the IPO came to be known as the “Netscape Moment,” a blockbuster stock offering that won wide attention and, in this case, illuminated the web for millions of people. The “Netscape Moment” anticipated the dot.com boom of the late 1990s.
By no means did the web arrive fully formed, of course. It was crude by contemporary standards. Newsweek likened the online experience in 1995 to “a journey to a rugged, exotic destination — the pleasures are exquisite, but you need some stamina.”
Most Americans were not online then, and those who were — 14 percent had internet access in 1995, according to the Pew Research Center’s predecessor organization — mostly did so through quirky dial-up phone modems. Many people accessed the internet using service providers such as CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online.
But by 1995, most Americans had at least heard about the internet and the web, and could sense something important was afoot. Inevitably, coherent characterizations of the online world were challenging for journalists. Those explanations seem quaint and amusing today.
Thirty years ago this month, for example, an Associated Press report called the web “a string of data bases available through the global maze of computer networks known as the Internet.” The New York Times said it was as “a section of the Internet overflowing with sights and sounds.”
Late in the year, the Times declared the web had become “a full-fledged media star, hailed and hyped, part technology and part fashion accessory.” In a report about popular fascination with the online world in 1995, the Philadelphia Inquirer said the web was “an electronic publishing service for pictures, sound and video, as well as text.”
In a frothy, year-end cover story, Newsweek characterized the web as “an awesome construct where the publishing efforts of thousands of people are interlinked into a massive seething monument to human expression, enabling everything from shopping for a new car to keeping track of Madonna’s biological clock.”
Skeptics scoffed that the “massive seething monument to human expression” was little more than a fad. No contrarian was more insistent than Clifford Stoll, an astronomer who in 1995 brought out the book, “Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.” It makes for entertaining reading — if mostly for its jaw-dropping assortment of misguided predictions. Stoll, who said he been online for years, wrote, for example:
• “Video-on-demand, that killer application of communications, will remain a dream.”
• “I don’t believe that phone books, newspapers, magazines, or corner video stores will disappear as computer networks spread. Nor do I think that my telephone will merge with my computer, to become some sort of information appliance.”
• “What will the electronic book look like? Some sort of miniature laptop computer, I’d guess. We’ll download selections and page through them electronically. Try reading electronic books. They’re awful.”
Stoll previewed his book in an essay in Newsweek on Feb. 27, 1995, that has become something of a cult classic, which is frequently rediscovered online. The essay, in which Stoll dismissed the online world as a “most trendy and oversold community,” appeared beneath the headline, “The Internet? Bah!”
It was easy in 1995 to misread the emergent digital landscape and dismiss its dynamism.
W. Joseph Campbell is a professor emeritus at American University in Washington, D.C. He has written seven solo-authored books, including “1995: The Year the Future Began.”
