To give perspective, the early 90s internet was still just a very loose collection of servers and hosted pages that you had to find the address for through any means necessary - mainly magazines, email lists, or word-of-mouth. In the mid 90s we began to see an increase of commercial ISPs pushing into home use of computers for internet usage (AOL and many similar). This was truly revolutionary. They created a user friendly infrastructure to navigate a galaxy of disconnected modem languages. Before this time, the internet was primarily scholars and academics bumping around on hosted BBS boards or forums, connecting manually to shared servers. You could access stored data on these servers, but good luck finding them without assistance. Keep in mind that computer memory, connection speeds, and processing power were in their relative infancy. By the mid 90s we began to see services like Geocities create standardized HTML and individual websites for users to adopt. Instead of figuring out individual server accounts, users were now able to create media platforms with very little expertise. This led to a boom of testing grounds for hosting and coding.

From a personal anectdode, I set up my first computer, plugged it into a phone jack at home and popped in an ISP floppy disk that was bundled with the computer. This disk have a somewhat universal installation system that allowed me, as a child, to dial up and connect to a centralized ISP server. Because the service was designed to hold your hand through the connection process users typically found themselves in a main server with very few options: Games, Research, Information, Stocks, and News. Each of these options would bring up a fairly strict set of sites you could visit. The larger internet was still difficult to explore in the absence of centralized search engines. Yahoo and others were early adopters of search engine algorithms, though still focused on internal pages and indexes. Google in is infancy would be almost impossible to imagine: a blank screen with just the Google logo and a search bar. Your results would typically end up as independently hosted sites or government (often East Coast libraries) catalogues.

If you wanted to find music, for example, you might search for specific songs and find results for singular pages with a few files available to download. These weren't MP3s, Wavs, or even Real media files. Early on we just had MIDI tracks to choose from. Images were similar. A user might search for a topic and find a page that just had hyperlinks to jpgs stored in a server. The download speeds meant that up to several hours were needed to download a single file. It wasn't until the mid 90s that it was common to find images that you could view within a website. You would just download a file and open it in the morning.

Various methods of chatrooms were created to take the place of slower text forums. These were often poorly programmed and easy to hack/destroy.

What I find just interesting was the financial side of the development of the internet. In the mid 90s programmers had figured out how to incorporate credit card transactions, so you could potentially buy or sell goods online. But there was no guarantee that your purchases were legitimate. I think the first major clearing house that had a trusted financial model was Ebay. There were others, but this was the first time that mom and pop could get on the World Wide Web and buy/sell crazy stuff. With a secure platform folks were able to collect or spend money with a guarantee that the transaction would be honored.

The mid 90s internet was a fascinating time, a bridge between obscure servers and advertised web services. Nothing was to be trusted but the potential palpable.