If you were trying to spend your free time browsing in 1995, there wasn’t actually much to do. Nowadays you could say that if it’s not on the internet, it doesn’t exist. Fifteen years ago the online world (AKA cyberspace, for the old-schoolers) was a far smaller place. One problem that used to make the internet a ghetto was that just getting online for a few minutes a day was too expensive.
Fifteen years ago there was no Wikipedia. If you wanted to know about something, your best shot was Microsoft’s Encyclopedia, Encarta (CD-ROM). Social Networks wasn’t even a word (it was and still is, two), and instant messaging for the masses was just pointless; there were no masses online back in 95′. If you wanted to get social, BBSs were still the place to go.
News
Today, if you say news, your reflex is to type CNN.com, BBC.co.uk, NewYorkTimes.com; or better yet, get any kind of news you want pushed to your connected device of choice. In 1996, news were the least thing you would expect in a news site. Viewer discretion is advised when opening the BBC screenshot, it may damage your retinas.
Full Size Screenshots: BBC, CNN
Search
Google, Bing, Yahoo! That’s the search engine podium in 2010. In the childhood days of the web the only player in the arena was Yahoo! Google wasn’t born until 1998 and Bing is only 1 year old. To search for something, you went to Yahoo!, Webcrawler, Altavista or Lycos.
Full Size Screenshots: Yahoo!, Lycos, Webcrawler, Altavista
Blogs
Blog was another word not yet created in the mid 90s’. People still had personal pages, but they were hosted in Geocities, which closed in 2009, making lots of people sad.
Full Size Screenshot: Geocities
Geekdom and Technology
Forget about Gizmodo, Engadget and the tsunami of technology and gadget news we consume daily in 2010. During the early days of the web, your only fix of geek news would consist in browsing Microsoft’s, or Apple’s websites.
Full Size Screenshots: Apple, Mircrosoft
But wait… there was a Facebook. It was called Classmates, which still exists but looks like a very boring place for sad and boring Gen X.
Image credit, Stock.Xchng
Article by Fernando
This is my blog - I write about careers, talent management and organizational development. I've been featured at Monster.com, Alltop, WeBlogBetter and BloggingPro among others. I hope you leave this blog with more than you arrived and I look forward to discussing your ideas and projects with you. See you in the comments section.
Fernando has written 230 awesome articles for us at Fernando Tarnogol – Careers Blog
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