internethistory

Wrapping up the 1996 series on Cybercultural, in this post I look at web portals, the continued rise of e-commerce, CSS and Flash arriving on the scene for web designers, and the emergence of web applications from Netscape. Starting next week, I'll be diving into 1997 internet history. https://cybercultural.com/p/internet-1996/ #InternetHistory

This week's #InternetHistory post on Cybercultural was an excuse to revisit my favourite boyhood band, Duran Duran. Back in 1997, they became the first major label artist to offer an online single for sale. This was a couple of years before Napster and more than 5 years before the iTunes Store! It was all thanks to a couple of now mostly forgotten companies: N2K and Liquid Audio. Full story: https://cybercultural.com/p/digital-music-sales-1997/ #DuranDuran #90s

In 1997, the first browser war began amid new internet trends like 'push' and DHTML. Meanwhile, instant messaging apps like ICQ and AIM became popular and GeoCities achieved 1 million users. https://cybercultural.com/p/internet-1997/ #InternetHistory

I look back on the 3 musketeers of web design in the 1990s: Jeffrey Zeldman, David Siegel, and Jakob Nielsen. Each had a distinct web design philosophy (and if you read till the end, you'll discover which one I believe 'won' in the long term). I focus in particular on 1997, which is when Flash and CSS emerged. But I also look back on the careers of the 3 gurus from our 2025 perspective. https://cybercultural.com/p/web-design-1997/ #InternetHistory #WebDesign

Back in 1997, the browser plugin RealPlayer became synonymous with "buffering" — which for 90s web users meant constant, annoying delays in streaming a video online (usually over dial-up). Funnily enough though, the buffering epidemic didn't dampen the HYPE for online video streaming that year. Wired magazine even declared that RealVideo was leading a “war with TV.” And you thought AI hype was bad... https://cybercultural.com/p/video-streaming-1997/ #InternetHistory #VideoStreaming

"I want my MTV...as long as it's the Java version in IE4."

MTV's website in 1997 was a hodgepodge of technologies: Java, JavaScript, frames and more. The quality of your user experience depended on which browser you used: Netscape or IE. https://cybercultural.com/p/browser-war-1990s/ #InternetHistory #BrowserWar

"Well, we don’t feel threatened." That's the Olim brothers — founders of dot-com online music retailer, CDnow — talking about Amazon. It's from a book they published in 1998 entitled "The CDnow Story: Rags to Riches on the Internet". At the start of '98, they were the leaders in online music retail. But in June 1998 [cue ominous music] Amazon branched out from books and added a Music tab to its fast growing e-commerce website... https://cybercultural.com/p/cdnow-amazon-1998/ #InternetHistory #CDnow #Amazon

This week's Cybercultural article looks back on 1998, the year of the portal: Excite, Netscape Netcenter, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and others all competing for eyeballs and trying to be sticky. But with so many portals, some inevitably failed. https://cybercultural.com/p/portals-1998/ #InternetHistory

It took me ages to find screenshots of BowieNet as it looked on launch in September 1998, but I finally found some beauties. Oh, and I explain how BowieNet not only became the default online community for David Bowie fans, it also anticipated the social networks that would emerge in the 2000s, like Facebook and Reddit. https://cybercultural.com/p/bowienet-launch-1998/ #InternetHistory #BowieForever