nytimes.com: 1996

The New York Times was an innovator in the early years of the WWW. They were one of the first newspapers to deliver content online and they continued to offer the content for free (with registration) for many years. Once they had a contest to rewrite the motto 'All the news the fit to print' for their online edition. This early site from 1996 but with a 45K size main graphic was a pain to download over a 28 baud modem.

Gopher: early 1990's

The Gopher Procotol was a pre-http hypertext transfer protocol popular in the early 1990's. It was used a lot by colleges and researchers to shared information. Gopher forces a hierarchical site design similar to directories and files. The HTML markup language used for the world wide web allows for addressing other pages from any other pages. Although gopher once was more popular than ftp, there are not many gopher sites left. Voice of America continues to provides a gopher newsfeed, which is a precursor to rss feeds. Mozilla still supports the gopher protocol. The floodgap.com site has a gopher to web gateway so that you can still browse any gopher sites by Internet Explorer.

Bartcop.com: 1996

Lately, I've been looking for sites that were transitions from UseNet newgroups to Web pages. Bartcop is a great example. He started out as a chronic poster to alt.fan.rush-limbaugh and it evolved into a newsletter then to simple web pages. Now it's a full website with subscriptions, discussion groups, radio shows, advertisements. It's still has chronic content, but it's admirable that it has lasted for ten years.

Note: 'chronic' is a talk radio industry term for a caller to a show who goal is to torment hosts by challenging them logically, changing the subject, or up-staging the host. Lionel from WOR in New York is an example of a chronic caller who became a national syndicated show.

L.A.con III, the 1996 Worldcon

I love this L.A.con III home page. This 1996 website, put up by the World Science Fiction Society, is a great example of the trends that were going on at that time. This website had everything: the square icon clip art every website seemed to have, the 'new' icons on every link and the use of links to text (.txt) documents. The inclusion of the text documents enable the reuse of content on websites and in Usenet newsgroups. In the mid 1990's, Usenet newsgroups and BBS were still a primary way for technology focused folks to share information. Note that cassettes were used to for recordings of sessions.