What the Internet Was Like in 1994
In 1994, the World Wide Web became the default multimedia channel of the Internet. With the launch of Netscape Navigator and early websites like Yahoo! and HotWired, the Web achieved lift-off.
The World Wide Web was in its infancy as 1994 dawned. There were just 623 websites in the entire world at the beginning of the year. By June 1994, that figure had risen to 2,738 and by year's end it had tipped over 10,000. So the Web’s exponential growth began in 1994, although it wasn’t yet a mainstream technology.
Some key websites debuted in 1994 — such as Yahoo!, the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA), Cool Site of the Day, and HotWired. But none of them would’ve existed without the Netscape Navigator web browser.
Netscape in 1994
Netscape Navigator was the world's first commercial web browser. Although when the company was formed in April 1994, by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, the business plan wasn't immediately clear. In a message sent to a newsgroup in May 1994, Andreessen talked about offering a “cyberspace mall” service, “to support hypermedia information distribution and interactive transactions.”
The confusion was understandable, because the Web hadn't yet established itself. The Internet was still largely a text-based medium, accessed through systems like Gopher, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), and online portals like CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL.
But over the rest of 1994, Netscape's web browser became the conduit to a new world of images, audio files, and even video clips. Even better, all of this was on a truly open Internet network (the Web had been gifted to the public domain by CERN in April 1993).
That the Web and Netscape opened up the Internet to multimedia was extraordinary when you think about how slow the Net was at that time. The December announcement of Navigator 1.0 claimed that it was “optimized to run smoothly over 14.4 kilobit/second modems as well as higher bandwidth lines, delivering performance as much as ten times that of other network browsers.”
The “as well as higher bandwidth lines” bit was due to the appearance of the first 28.8 kilobit/second modems onto the market in late-1994, potentially offering speeds twice as fast as the previous generation. But still very slow, because this was pre-broadband — you had to "dial-up" the internet on your phone line, which hadn’t been designed for high-speed multimedia.
Yahoo! and Perl
In January 1994, two Stanford University graduate students — Jerry Yang and David Filo — created a web directory named “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” It went by various other names in early 1994 (such as “Hierarchical Hotlist” and “Jerry & Dave’s Guide to WWW”), before being christened "Yahoo!" in April of that year.
Throughout the rest of 1994, Yang and Filo quietly developed the website in their Stanford dorm rooms — it was just a part-time hobby at this point. (Aside: despite being called Yahoo! since April, the pair didn't buy the domain name yahoo.com until January 1995!)
The development of Yahoo over 1994 also showcased the emergence of Perl as a web language for building a ‘dot-com’ business — even though what Yahoo’s founders initially built wasn’t much more sophisticated than the CGI scripts created by amateur teenagers in 1993. In any case, Yahoo co-founder David Filo later told Perl creator Larry Wall that Yahoo “could never have been started without Perl.”
Even though the Perl scripts helped automate part of the process of creating the Yahoo directory — in particular the generation of the web pages — the groundwork of filtering and categorizing websites was a manual process. As explained in a Stanford case study:
“Jerry’s Guide was a labor of love–lots of labor, since no software program could evaluate and categorize sites. Filo persuaded Yang to resist the engineer’s first impulse to try to automate the process. “No technology could beat human filtering,” Filo argued.”
Multimedia Evolves
It took all of 1994 for Yahoo! to become something more than a simple list of text links. So what was multimedia before the Web took off?
In a 1994 book entitled “How Multimedia Works,” Erik Holsinger defined interactivity as the key ingredient that separated multimedia from other forms of media, such as television. However, he struggled to define the form factor that multimedia would inhabit. Like many in the industry, Holsinger thought multimedia in the home would start out as “some type of CD-ROM player that is hooked directly into a television,” and over time become integrated into cable TV.
But there was a growing sense that neither CD-ROMs nor TV sets were optimal ways to experience multimedia. In mid-1994 David Bowie released a CD-ROM entitled Jump, but he didn't think it was truly interactive. He'd begun work on a new multimedia project with Brian Eno and told the New York Times in July 1994:
"...we keep translating everything to be interactive. The medium that we are working in is not actually CD-ROM. The medium is interactive multimedia, and I think that the CD-ROM is only the best delivery system currently available."
Alas, Bowie and Eno never did release a multimedia product, but several years later Bowie and his digital team launched a pioneering web portal called BowieNet.
So in 1994, nobody had yet figured out how people should consume multimedia. That said, there was no shortage of computer software for people to create it. With software like Apple QuickTime, Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Director, it was possible for computer-savvy people to create multimedia content on their personal computers. These same companies would go on to provide some of the key web building tools of the mid-to-late 1990s.
Ready for Mainstream
Although much of the interactive multimedia focus was on CD-ROMs during 1994, there were some multimedia experiments happening on the World Wide Web. Of particular note was a prototype online music service called the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA), which had debuted on the Web around November 1993.
The idea behind IUMA was to help musicians who weren't signed by a major label. Like much of the early Web, it had an anti-establishment feel — one of its goals was to create a distribution alternative to record labels. Indie artists would send the IUMA team their music, which was converted to a digital file and manually uploaded to the site. (Similar to early Yahoo!, running IUMA required manual labour at this time.)
By the end of 1994, IUMA was showing the way towards a full multimedia Web. Its website was colourful and truly interactive — even if it took a while to download MP2 files on your dial-up modem. The Web was even mature enough for IUMA to give you the following choice of modes on its website: "Graphical" or "dull text."
With a new year around the corner, it was clear that millions more people would soon be ready and able to select "Graphical."
Read next: More year-by-year overviews of internet history
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