The Hill: 'The Internet? Bah!' Remembering 1995, the year of the world wide web.

[Dennis Donovan]

The Hill - ‘The Internet? Bah!’ Remembering 1995, the year of the world wide web.

by W. Joseph Campbell, opinion contributor - 02/27/25 10:00 AM ET



It’s now been 30 years since the internet and the world wide web undeniably entered mainstream consciousness.

A remarkable variety of digital mainstays trace their emergence to 1995, an innovative time crucial to the content and character of the digital landscape. In July 1995, Amazon.com began selling books online, although few noticed. The online dating service Match.com got started in 1995. So, too, did the predecessors of Craigslist and eBay.

CNN.com was launched in 1995. The New York Times offered a “special on-line report” in October 1995 during the visit pf Pope John Paul II to the U.S. It was a toe-dipping exercise for the newspaper, which went online in January 1996 as “The New York Times on the Web.”

Hints of social media were apparent in 1995 too, notably with the launch of Classmates.com, which digitized yearbooks and reconnected high school friends long after their graduation.

Online streaming became a fledgling reality in early September 1995, when a major league baseball game between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees was broadcast live online, using RealAudio technology. A writer for the Los Angeles Times complained that the audio quality was not “great,” and noted that although “Internet users all over the world had access to the broadcast, the system was only able to accommodate several hundred of them at a time.”

/snip

[House of Roberts]

1. I remember our first computer was a Windows 95 made by Digital.

We used it to produce invoices and repair tickets for our car shop. I seem to recall the processor was 75mhz.

[lapfog_1]

2. The internet is close to 59 years old ( it's predecessor was almost 30 years old BY 1995 )

The web is just an application, like email. It was invented at CERN in Switzerland by Tim Berners-Lee in the mid 1990s ( yet another government sponsored bit of software, given away for FREE ).

Elon built his fortune on using the creation of other people, most of whom worked for national governments. Scientists and inventors, not working to make someone else rich, but working to help citizens. Elons first real money maker was Paypal.

from the wikipedia...

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.[1]

Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers.[2] Taylor appointed Larry Roberts as program manager. Roberts made the key decisions about the request for proposal to build the network.[3] He incorporated Donald Davies' concepts and designs for packet switching,[4][5] and sought input from Paul Baran on dynamic routing.[6] In 1969, ARPA awarded the contract to build the Interface Message Processors (IMPs) for the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN).[7][8] The design was led by Bob Kahn who developed the first protocol for the network. Roberts engaged Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA to develop mathematical methods for analyzing the packet network technology.[6]

I should know, I wrote ( as one of the wonderkids of that era ) code for the IMPs when I was a young person in college. It was written in machine language because the IMPs were essentially very low performance mini/micro computers that processed the packets from the network and turned them into messages for the "mainframes" of that era.

BTW, please NOTE that the Arpanet and therefore the Internet was created not by private industry, but with your tax dollars at a federal government agency. Please repeat that often to those that say the federal government doesn't ever do anything for people...