What was the Internet like in the early 1990s?
363634
all text, no graphics and very limited in scope.  people chatted on "bulletin boards" and not thru IMs or chat rooms.
962743
nope, sorry, the 90's for me were like the 60's for my parents
53878
Oh my oh my - how we all forget our roots.\n\nThis is a long story that can either be super geeky or just consumer oriented.  \n\nThe short story is that the internet was developed by a combination of researchers, academics, business folk and free spirits during a period when governments were too absorbed in other issues to meddle with progress.  \n\nSee a few good sources below!
980829
Yes the old .net days I remember it back in 2002 or something.
21092
There were lots of things around before AOL mostly things called BBS or bulletin board service, they were run by individuals, and their contents were varied, the largest network I remember was one called Prodigy which was like a very large BBS, but it had many of features that would look familiar today. It was a pay service but instead of paying a monthly fee, you had to pay by the hour, like many of the early internet services.
1176059
Origins of the Internet\n\nThe first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, 4 starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.\n\nLeonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 and the first book on the subject in 1964. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major step along the path towards computer networking. The other key step was to make the computers talk together. To explore this, in 1965 working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first (however small) wide-area computer network ever built. The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed.\n\nIn late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND. The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work. The word "packet" was adopted from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. 5\n\nIn August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ was released by DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared by Kleinrock's team at UCLA. 6\n\nDue to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET. All this came together in September 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS, an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node. SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. One mont
953852
Internet Services  and consumer/market trends
13306
I agree with the above poster. Here is some additional information:\n\nThe information highway is a term used especially in the 1990s to describe the Internet. The official project was dubbed the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and went beyond the interconnectivity of just computers; the scope broadened to include all types of data transmissions between a plethora of places, people, and devices. It is often associated with the US politician and former vice president, Al Gore, who promoted funding for programmes that led to aspects of the development of the Internet, although its currency was wider than merely Gore — many policy organisations made pronouncements about the so-called information highway or the variant information superhighway. Both terms are used less frequently now that for many people the Internet has become a less abstract and more concrete thing; the highway analogy, though useful and apt, has perhaps served its purpose.\n\nIt is used in early editions of Wired Magazine as well as Popular Mechanics.\n\nInternet denizens sometimes use these terms in reference to the terms' overuse by traditional popular media (and consequently by non-Internet-users) while the Internet was still becoming mainstream. Compare with the term Interweb. Many geeks often use it in a mocking tone, poking fun at the press for always being hopelessly behind in their description of technical matters.
10205
The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.\nThe Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal. were added. By January 1971, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were added. In months to come, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois plugged in. After that, there were far too many to keep listing here.\n\nThe Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.\n\nThe early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system.
930558
"No one person invented the Internet", here is a page that gives information on the people who were instrumental in its development.\nhttp://www.boutell.com/newfaq/history/inventednet.html\n\nThe world wide web on the other hand was "invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1990. In 1989, while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research)"\n\nhttp://www.boutell.com/newfaq/history/inventedweb.html
13805
Depends on your definition of when the Internet began, but Ray Tomlinson sent the first network e-mail.  Please check the linked source for the full story.
1148717
Communication has never been the same since the advent of the internet. Like this message board - it wouldn't have been possible to talk to hundreds of strangers everyday back in the day.
1182608
Internet porn has been arount since about the 90's to my knowledge
46226
You asked, "What was the first website ever?" Well, that depends on your definition of "web site." It would be great if there was a nice clear-cut answer, but, like most inventions, the world wide web didn't just pop into existence all at once....It happened (and is still happening) in stages. A reasonable answer might be the site that Tim Berners-Lee put together at CERN for the development of the first Browser/Editor, called WorldWideWeb, in 1990. But people might say, no, that didn't have enough in it of what we would today call "web technology" to qualify. Others might say, no, there were earlier things that qualify like Vanevar Bush's " As We May Think" article in the July 1945 Atlantic Monthly.\n\nBut I'll stick with whatever test data Berners-Lee used in the development of the program called WorldWideWeb. Certainly by 1993, there were several sites at CERN that qualified by most people's definition.
528691
We shouldn't confuse "Internet" with "World Wide Web". A project of a far-reaching network of computers that was probably started in the late 60's/early 70's by the Department of Defense could be construed to be the dawning of the Internet. However, the "World Wide Web" was started around 1990 by C.E.R.N. in Geneva, Switzerland. It was used as a global network between scientist to trade ideas and research results.
445195
The internet started with a concept of operations that did not require any single line to remain open. The idea was something like a "web", so that if any node, or even several nodes were disconnected, information could still be passed from one place to another relatively quickly. One of the first theoretical applications of this is in the USA was intended as a way for the government to continue to operate during a nuclear war with the USSR. Over time, this became more popular with a commercially based crowd and eventually the world-wide web emerged as a standard.
1054034
The USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in February 1958 to regain a technological lead. ARPA created the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) to further the research of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment program, which had networked country-wide radar systems together for the first time. J. C. R. Licklider was selected to head the IPTO, and saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution. Licklider recruited Lawrence Roberts to head a project to implement a network, and Roberts based the technology on the work of Paul Baran who had written an exhaustive study for the U.S. Air Force that recommended packet switching (as opposed to Circuit switching) to make a network highly robust and survivable. After much work, the first node went live at UCLA on October 29, 1969 on what would be called the ARPANET, the "eve" network of today's Internet.\n\nThe first TCP/IP wide area network was operational by 1 January 1983 , when the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone that would later become the NSFNet. (This date is held by some to be technically that of the birth of the Internet.) It was then followed by the opening of the network to commercial interests in 1995. Important separate networks that offered gateways into, then later merged into the NSFNet include Usenet, Bitnet and the various commercial and educational X.25 Compuserve and JANET. Telenet (later called Sprintnet), was a large privately-funded national computer network with free dialup access in cities throughout the U.S. that had been in operation since the 1970s. This network eventually merged with the others in the 1990s as the TCP/IP protocol became increasingly popular. The ability of TCP/IP to work over these pre-existing communication networks allowed for a great ease of growth. Use of Internet as a phrase to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated around this time.\n\nThe network gained a public face in the 1990s. In August 1991 CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland publicized the new World Wide Web project, two years after Tim Berners-Lee had begun creating HTML, HTTP and the first few web pages at CERN. In 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the Mosaic web browser version 1.0, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic/technical Internet. By 1996 the word "Internet" was common public currency, but it referred almost entirely to the World Wide Web.\n\nMeanwhile, over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public computer networks (although some networks such as FidoNet have remained separate). This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.