Listicle history of the internet

February 21, 2023 1:12 PM

Keith Lynch's timeline of net related terms and concepts (up until 2006)
posted by buffy12 (15 comments total)

A reasonable spread. I kept thinking of things that could be on the list but it's what's in Keith's email archives, not "notable events" or "things rmd1023 remembers". A few things showed up later than I expected, a few things earlier, and the combination tells me a bit about what kinds of email he was likely reading/saving.

Thanks for posting.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:52 PM on February 21, 2023

Laughing that "Purity Test" is older than "Internet."
posted by rikschell at 2:05 PM on February 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Why is Dilbert on that list?
posted by queensissy at 4:19 PM on February 21, 2023

I thought I was the only one who remembered Googlewhacking, for you youngsters out there it was constructing a Google search that returned only one result. Also:

01 I bought my name as a .com URL
posted by Grumpy old geek at 5:59 PM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Born into this world at

92 1 Gopher (a data retrieval tool)

navigating the directory on the computer in the HS library
posted by pjenks at 6:05 PM on February 21, 2023

This is very good.
posted by Nelson at 6:34 PM on February 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I thought I was the only one who remembered Googlewhacking ...
Oh, I'd forgotten about that! That was back when Google was an actual search engine rather than an advertising platform.
posted by dg at 7:24 PM on February 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Googlewhacking had a scoring system: find a two-word googlewhack (no quoting!), and score it by multiplying the Google "About N results" for the two individual words.
posted by away for regrooving at 9:27 PM on February 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had not thought of Craig Shergold for a very long time. Sad to see that he died of Covid a couple of years ago, age 40.
posted by tavella at 12:10 AM on February 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Listicle history of the internet

So it's a histicle?
posted by Paul Slade at 3:22 AM on February 22, 2023

89 world.std.com (an ISP, supposedly the first directly on the Internet)

My dad had a dialup shell account at world.std.com, but if Gopher was '92 then that means I probably didn't start using the Internet until after that. I think 94 was around the time that other, more local ISPs came along offering dialup PPP connections, and upgrading to a "graphical" connection was a big deal.

I'm surprised Internet-In-A-Box isn't listed, because that's how we got our first web browser and copy of Trumpet Winsock.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:25 AM on February 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think I still have my dad's first-edition O'Reilly's Internet in a Nutshell and The Whole Internet. My go-to book for those early days was Free Stuff From The Internet.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:26 AM on February 22, 2023

I still have my 1993 copy of IDG Books' The Internet for Dummies (2nd edition). Didn't help me then, doesn't help me now.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:48 AM on February 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Same goes for The Internet Yellow Pages (Osborne, 1994). "Shows you how to access thousands of free internet resources from all over the world," it promises.
posted by Paul Slade at 6:04 AM on February 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

So it's a histicle?

We would also have accepted "lwasticle"
posted by cortex at 6:35 AM on February 22, 2023