When the Web Was New

Ten years on, Technology Review's first article about the Web is a painfully amusing read -- and reminds us how much has changed.

Author's Note:

When I wrote this article, I had just finished graduate school at MIT and was a struggling neophyte in technology journalism. I knew that there was something important about this Web stuff; a lot of MIT students were already building their own pages, some faculty were posting their course notes, and you could even order flowers online.

But virtually none of the technologies that make the Web so powerful today had yet been conceived. So, please read this with a forgiving eye. Some of the locutions I used to describe basic Web concepts are laughably baroque -- but at the time, remember, the vocabulary that we all know by heart today didn't exist.

Just one month before this article appeared, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" had incorporated as one of the first dotcoms, under its new name: Yahoo!. Even words like "page" and "link" and "windows" were so new that my editor and I felt compelled to put quote marks around them.

How easy it is to forget that many of the technologies that structure our lives today are less than a decade old. -- By Wade Roush.

Spinning a Better Web

Technology Review, April 1995

Opening a booth in the vast electronic mall known as the World Wide Web is fast becoming one of the hippest ways to reach customers and constituents, to judge by the actions of a growing cadre of businesses, government agencies, universities, and other organizations. The newest segment of the global Internet, the Web lets users wander by clicks of a computer mouse among thousands of custom-designed multimedia documents stored in linked computers. But as the system grows, it's encountering some very old-fashioned headaches: the mall's parking lot is full, pickpocketing is a constant hazard, and there's no directory for orienting oneself.

Worse still, the response to these difficulties could lead to broader problem: the development of software and data that don't share underlying protocols. This would wall off certain portions of the Web to many users, even though the idea that all documents should be available to all users -- in Web lingo, "interoperable" -- is a key Web feature.

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In 1990, researchers at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (better known by its French acronym CERN) set up the Web as a way for high-energy physicists to keep abreast of one another's progress. The idea that was one physics team might create a Web document, or "page," of text using an article or a set of data, noting somewhere within the text the existence of, say, a corresponding graphic set up as a separate page in the system.