DISQUS

LivePaola · 10 months ago

eBay was there too in 1996 (Pierre Omidyar started it in 1995). Sure, text-only, no item photos, very basic... yet I am surprised that Manjoo's article doesn't even mention it.

Keith · 10 months ago

I completely concur. The internet of 1996 was amazing. As you noted it is a fools errand to examine history in a comparative fashion. The Slate author was obviously having a slow day with a fast approaching headline.

I'd challenge him to examine the pre-Internet BBS days and hopefully he would realize that the networked data has always been a fascinating arena.

skribe · 10 months ago

I'd stopped paying by the hour for my internet in 93. By 96 I'd been on permanent dialup for 2 years. /. began in 96 so there was plenty to do =) Also there was a stack of mu* (the Second Life's of their day) to while away the endless hours between shopping trips to Amazon. I stopped buying newspapers in 96 so the news coverage was pretty good. I remember scripting up pages to grab 'my news headlines' and comics and show them on my personal news page. This was before rss and it was a constant battle to keep ahead of the sites who were always changing the layout in order to defeat folks like me. Good times.

Des Walsh · 10 months ago

Singularly dumb, to rely on the Internet Archive and people who were "watching the Web closely back then". "Watching"? Oh, like the people who "watch" social media now and declare it all meaningless?
Your post prompted me to check back on a resource I put together in 1996 and posted. I wanted to be able to compare the arts policies of the parties in the Australian federal electoral sphere. I was amazed that from my home office in Sydney, at no cost other than the already paid connection cost, I was able to pull together a unique resource for anyone who wanted to compare the policies of the parties.
The other bit the Slate writer doesn't get is the community aspect. Yes, on Compuserve we paid so much in Australia that we used special tools to download threads, reply/comment offline and then upload them in a batch. But we were part of global conversations that were simply not possible before for any but some very privileged people, or very savvy techies. And then travelling and meeting face to face people, you had become friends with virtually, was something so amazing that friends and family who stayed determinedly offline simply did not get.
We did "not very much"? Little does your Slate person know.

Des Walsh · 10 months ago

By the way, that resource I put together, the arts policies of the political parties? Gone, not archived. I used to be such a fan/advocate of the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine, but sadly it's a shadow of the original dream.