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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Netscape in 1994: The Rise of the Webuloids
By the time Netscape Navigator was released in December 1994, the World Wide Web was beginning to overcome bandwidth restrictions and live up to its potential as a multimedia portal to the internet.
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Internet Underground Music Archive in 1994
By early 1994, the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) had migrated from Usenet and Gopher to the emerging internet platform, the World Wide Web. It was one of the first multimedia websites.
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CD-ROMS in 1994: Bowie, Prince, Gabriel, and Cybermania '94
David Bowie, Prince and Peter Gabriel all had interactive CD-ROMs out in 1994, and had plans for further multimedia projects. But by the end of the year, the CD-ROM format was effectively over.
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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.
