Internet in the 90's

Teens watch the 90’s era instructional video, Kids’ Guide to The Internet and discuss how the internet has evolved over time.

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Source: Fine Brothers Entertainment

Level

Basic

Knowledge is the life of the mind

Asking for someones MSN,

not their phone number

The first version of MSN Messenger Service
was released July 22, 1999.

It included only basic features,
such as plain text messaging
and a simplistic contact list.

It was a direct rival to AOL’s popular
AIM instant messenger.

Discover what websites used to look like

With about 456 billion web pages saved over time the Wayback Machine contains a great collection of snapshots from websites since it started in 1996.

Take a trip in the Wayback Machine

In 1997 the Google search engine indexed about 25 million pages. In 2015 Google has indexed about 60 trillion individual pages in their search engine.

Originally, Dell did not emphasize the consumer market. This changed when the company’s Internet site took off in 1996 and 1997.

In 1997 Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft and had about 8.5 million active users. In 2013 Hotmail was replaced by Outlook.com and has about 400 million active users.

When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to the company in July of 1997, it marked the beginning of Apple's resurrection.

The BBC news website was launched in November 1997. From 1998 to 2001 the site was named best news website at the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards.

Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia that was published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009.

MTV.com was originally branded "MTV Online". It served as a counterpart to the America Online portal for MTV content, which existed at AOL keyword MTV until approximately the end of the 1990s.

The screeching, scratching sound your dial-up modem made as you hit the 'connect' button was like music to your ears

Read more about internet in the 90's

Imagine waiting for at least 20 minutes for every 5MB download

Read more about internet in the 90's

One of the most common ways the internet was depicted in the 1990s was people quite literally surfing it

Read more about internet in the 90's

Even my cat has its own page

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web… Now even my cat has its own page.

Bill Clinton
42nd President of the United States

The day the music was set free

Napster was envisioned as an independent peer-to-peer file sharing service. Its technology allowed people to easily share their MP3 files with other participants.

Napster was co-founded by Shawn Fanning, John Fanning, and Sean Parker.

The service operated between June 1999 and July 2001.

Winamp and RealPlayer were both popular media players during the 90’s.

The first version of Winamp was released in 1997 and grew quickly popular with over 3 million downloads, paralleling the developing trend of MP3 file sharing. By 2000, Winamp had over 25 million registered users.

The first version of RealPlayer was introduced in April 1995 as “RealAudio Player” and was one of the first media players capable of streaming media over the Internet.

RealPlayer was initially accessed by many users as a plugin to watch streaming video or listen to streaming audio but in the early 21st century, Adobe Flash and subsequently HTML5 video became preferred options for this purpose.