Before the cats came: The web of 1995 leaves me nostalgic for simpler times

id=”article-body” class=”row ” section=”article-body” data-component=”trackCWV”>

My web circa 1995 will always be three sites: Suck, Argon Zark and the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S Project.

Put up by two Rice University students to document their experiments to determine the properties of Twinkies, the  was text heavy, with cheesy graphics and tiny photos. Ugly, but full of smarts, character and innocent charm. And a quarter of a century later, the homespun site still makes me <grin>, even if the only way to see it is in the Internet Archive.

was sort of the opposite. A rude, irreverent and igaming malta slickly packaged (for the time) take on the news of the day with the tag line “a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun,” full of bite-sized snarky bits that presaged the writing style of Web 2.0. It launched and perished with the dotcom bubble. 

And the simply was Web 1995 — about it, designed specifically for it, packed full of links to take you to mysterious places and created with the cutting-edge procedural graphics software of the day from like KPT Bryce and Kai’s Power Tools. It was cluttered and complex and convoluted and crammed with dizzying colors and gradients that simply defied printing.

It also represents yesteryear’s web today: The original pages are a collection of links to dead or forgotten sites where you may serendipitously step on a nostalgia landmine. Unlike many of its cohort, though, it’s still alive and updated regularly.

, just before the (subsequently dubbed the “” when it ended five years later) officially . 

Many of us in tech publishing didn’t really notice. (At the time, I was one of them, working at short-lived magazine.) CNET was just one of the hordes of publications looking to plant its flag on the Web and grab a piece of the mindshare boom. It was the one with the bizarre logo that had a pipe in it and that — unlike many of us — had started with TV and not print. .

Clearly CNET had more staying power than we suspected it would.

<div class="shortcode video v2" data-video-playlist='[{"id":"8179f6ac-8e53-4147-bd34-6935d85214f8","title":"A look back at the launch of CNET.com","description":"CNET is turning back the clock with a look at its own history. And watch for a peek at CNET\u0027s first website.","slug":"a-look-back-at-the-launch-of-cnet-com","chapters":{"data":[],"paging":{"total":0,"limit":15,"offset":0}},"datePublished":"2020-05-26 18:20:00","duration":82,"mpxRefId":"pvig88Dm2sM10MReLf4C_oWb07K_eg9W","ratingVChip":"TV-14","primaryTopic":{"id":"1c0fd1cb-c387-11e2-8208-0291187b029a"},"author":{"id":"","firstName":"","lastName":""},"primaryCollection":{"id":"403a357e-aa74-4bc0-8177-5b0295ac344f","title":"CNET at website

Now playing:
Watch this:

A look back at the launch of CNET.com

1:22

1995: The wonder year

In the mid-1990s, the web and the internet experienced a tectonic shift, much of it concentrated in 1995. The , but toward the end of 1995 it went straight from toddler to moody, awkward teenager. The from 23,500 to 100,000 between June 1995 and January 1996, an increase of more than 300% compared with 135% the six months prior. 

Much of the growth explosion can be attributed to Windows 95 release, the first truly friendly and functional version of its operating system. With the debut of (the programming interface for connecting to networks) and the bundling of , which Microsoft also released in 1995, it was suddenly easy(ish) to pop on and check out the web. was wandering around lost at the time. That was the .

Everyone tried to find a way to impose some sort of order on the web-slash-internet, to avoid succumbing to feeling lost; that same feeling you get when shopping for a USB cable on . We generated to see and Internet directories like , which introduced its search feature in 1995. There were novel, but ultimately doomed, startups like , the spiritual predecessor of “see next,” and over the course of the following years more serious technologies like , the grandaddy-in-law of push notifications.

Porn was still mostly found on the internet, not yet on the web (which is really a layer on top of the internet). Links were still “hypertext links,” web development was “HTML authoring,” and we still called it “the World-Wide Web” and “the information superhighway.” GIFs and JPEGs and sound were “multimedia.” was the place to be if you wanted to create your own site. and boasted 2.9 million subscribers who paid it to connect to the Internet. 

Before the cats came

As this groundwork was being laid, the web in the first half of 1995 bore little resemblance to our experience today. Nothing popped up before, during or after you loaded a page. It was , before you could DM, PM or IM anyone. Before push notifications, before , before shopping was common and streaming was possible. Not just before — before . Before the Internet Archive. Before the and . Before GIFs became ironic.

Surfing really did look, feel and sound as depicted by . When I began to look at sites from 1996 — that’s the earliest the Internet Archive preserves — my first thought was the style sheets didn’t load properly. 

New technologies gaining prominence later in 1995 further built the foundation for the web we know today — the web woven into our lives so tightly that we freak out when disconnected. 

into the major browsers: ,  and different flavors of , to name a few. The keepers of the HTML standard, the , added forms to the HTML spec, enabling shopping and other transactional tasks. Both Netscape Navigator and IE added support, paving the way for the modern, interactive web. AltaVista, the first commercial internet-crawling search engine publicly launched.

entered its infancy that year, eventually becoming — and later Adobe — Flash. It may have outstayed its welcome, eventually turning into a ,  but within a few years of its introduction Flash and its counterpart turned the static web into the interactive web. And it was an epiphany.

True, the web remained an eyesore for a while longer. When HTML tables and client-side image maps arrived in 1996, richer-navigation graphics and multicolumn layouts finally began to change the look of the web. 

Ugly had its charms, though, something that I think today’s slick but more homogenous (), mobile-optimized designs tend to lack. 

Clogged pipes

Of course, bandwidth hampered the visual evolution of the web at the time. Consumer broadband was still a gleam in telecom and cable companies’ eyes. Most people paid on a — at best — blazing 28.8kbps dialup landline connection, but more typically 14.4kbps. 

If it were possible to create today’s CNET home page back then, it could have taken around 11 minutes to load. would have taken 2.5 seconds (rather than 0.04 second). Even 56kbps (with fax!) was about three years off. Tiny GIFs were preferable to heavy (by the standards of the day) JPEGs.

Nor would you be able to display it on screen. The typical monitor was a hulking 15-inch CRT with 1,024×1,068 resolution — but you probably had to drop to 800×600 if you wanted more than 256 colors, because that’s all could handle. If you could figure it out (don’t get me started on the state of the consumer GPU market in the early ’90s) or could handle it.

No free lunches

While the web started to become a lot more useful that year, its loss of innocence accelerated. Conflict among the old-school Internet veterans, the newbies come to play, the businesses seeking to commercialize it — ,   — and a growing class of hackers probing its weaknesses spurred . 

1995 was , starting the race to the bottom of intrusive, interruptive, attention-grabbing tactics that 25 years later give us the overlays, push notification requests, newsletter signups, autoplay and more that pay the bills for the sites that cost you 10 seconds of close-clicking unwanted elements obscuring the page — just to spend two seconds figuring out that a -gamed snippet misled you about the content. 

It was the year the began and launched in anticipation of Microsoft shipping Windows 95 with Internet Explorer and MSN (at the time an online service) built in.

As people flocked to the easy-to-use web it drew increasing attention to the controversial aspects of the internet, such as the exchange of sexual content and copyrighted materials on , ultimately conflating “web” and “internet” forevermore. 

Online services started to feel the pressure to monitor subscribers. AOL’s newsworthy (and its subsequent reversal) seems quaint in light of over violence, hate speech and the spread of dangerous lies. 

But I also try to imagine how events from that year — the earthquakes in , and in ; the space shuttle and ; the ;  the ; the ; the ; the ; the ; the ; and the , just to name a few — would have played out differently in today’s by-the-minute, web-interconnected, high-bandwidth, phones-everywhere world.

It’s not a big stretch of imagination, though. The web in 1995 was fun, but 25 years later? Pivotal.