Dot-com
Internet history during the dot-com era, from the 1990s through to the first few years of the 2000s.
Note: some of these articles were migrated from my previous website, Web Development History (WDH), which was active during 2021. Check the timeline for a chronological list of WDH posts.
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Multimedia Gulch in 1994: The Age of Interactive CD-ROMs
Multimedia Gulch was a trendy neighbourhood in San Francisco in the 1990s, home to wannabe rock stars making CD-ROM adventure games. They lived fast in a time of slow modems.
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BowieNet: The Inside Story of its Creation
Part web portal, part ISP, part proto-blog, when David Bowie and his web team launched BowieNet in 1998, it was truly revolutionary. Cybercultural interviews one of its creators.
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1993: Mosaic Launches and the Web is Set Free
On 14 January 1993, Marc Andreessen put a call out on the WWW-Talk mailing list for people to test a new WWW browser in development: X Mosaic.
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1992: The Web vs Gopher, and the First External Browsers
Three new, non-CERN web browsers were released over 1992, at a time when there were less than twenty websites in the world. It was a turning point for the young Web.
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1991: Tim Berners-Lee Tries to Convert the Hypertext Faithful
After a year and a half of stalling from CERN management, Tim Berners-Lee must’ve hoped the momentum he’d gathered at the end of 1990 would continue into the new year. He was sadly mistaken.
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1990: Programming the World Wide Web
In the final few months of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau developed the world’s first browser, created HTML, wrote the first web server, and invented HTTP.
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1999: The Fall of Netscape and the Rise of Mozilla
By 1999, not only had Netscape fallen behind Microsoft in browser technology, it also had trouble navigating relationships — with both its parent AOL and the developers of its open source project, Mozilla.
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1996: Flash and CSS Bring Design to the Web
There were two stylistically opposed approaches to web design in the 1990s, epitomized by two distinct — and utterly different — technologies, both of which debuted in 1996.
