A trip to the internet in 1996 with The Rough Guide 2.0 (opens in new tab)

How I downloaded my first mp3:

  Went to altavista.com.
  Typed Dire_Straits_-_Sultans_of_Swing.mp3.
  Clicked the first link.

And as reminder, JavaScript was invented in 1995. Developed for Netscape 2.0.

I had a big book called “The Internet Yellow Pages” I believe, from.. 1995? Had websites, Usenet groups, telnet MUDs and BBSs, IRC, etc. Discovery was sometimes tough in those days, so why not get a printed book?

Somewhere I have a copy of one of Ed Krol's early O'Reilly books, The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, I think the 1993 edition that included the WWW nearly at the end of the book.

It's somehow fitting that every external link on its Wikipedia page is broken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User%27s_Guide_...

My first modem was 14,400 bps. So a whopping 1.8 KB/second on a good day :) It sure was fun in those days though. I also enjoyed hanging out in IRC, but even though it's not the same I do find Discord much better.

RealAudio (1995) also spawned RTSP (1996) which is remains a dominant protocol in media streaming for billions of IP based security cameras. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealAudio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Streaming_Protocol

One thing to consider when reading these kinds of books is that sponsors pay to have their products listed. Yahoo was big on doing this. Excite was known to do this a lot.

> In January 1996, George Bell joined Excite as its chief executive officer (CEO). Excite also purchased two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to other companies. Jim Bellows, then 72, was hired by Excite in 1994 to figure out how to present the content in a journalistic manner.[4] He paid good journalists to write brief reviews of web sites

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite_(web_portal)

The Modarchive[0] is still around, too. The reviewer’s (shared) password used to be since1996

[0]http://modarchive.org