John Podhoretz:  Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn’t understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.

Yesterday, back in the dark ages of 1995, “CNN debuts today on the Worldwide Web with its own homepage, accessing thousands of pages of data.”  Doesn’t that sound quaint?  Basic?  Its own homepage?  Was that a thing?

And back in the day, we thought we could shorten Worldwide Web to W3.  I don’t remember that, but I recall what the AOL homepage looked like.  “You’ve Got Mail” is still ingrained in my memory, and I remember how our internet connection was always so slow.  Our first home computer was an Acer, and I’m sure we paid a fortune of money for it.  But it never worked the way we wanted it to work.

The Internet, a book by Kerry Cochrane written in 1995, started with “Who hasn’t heard about the Internet? It’s mentioned on television, in the magazines, and on the radio. Everyone’s talking about it, and everyone wants to get connected to it.”

Today the internet has become an essential part of our lives that we all seem to take for granted.   Who doesn’t get upset when a website doesn’t load within seconds.  Today’s generation has vague memories of life before the Internet, but I still remember doing homework while referencing the World Book Encyclopedia.  Who knew in the 60s and 70s that we would one day have instant references at our fingertips?

The future of online shopping and instant access to much of the world’s knowledge was not a given in 1995.  As Cochrane explains in the introduction to The Internet, everyone was talking about it. But there were plenty of skeptics.  Newsweek printed an article in its February 27, 1995 issue expressing skepticism about this new-fangled contraption:

We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals.  We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations, and negotiate sales contracts.  Stores will become obsolete.  So how come my local mall does more business in one afternoon that the entire Internet handles in a month?  Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism:  salespeople.

Despite the skepticism, which was completely warranted when you think about what the Internet looked like in 1995, there were people who were futuristically explaining what the internet had to offer.  And what was written above has absolutely been proven true.

The Internet briefly explains the basics of 1995 email and how to find your way around the internet.  The last chapter, titled “Fun Places on the Internet,” is like a bizarre time capsule of the Internet’s baby pictures. Because even though the Internet’s “birth” can be traced to the first host-to-host connection at UCLA in 1969, the mid-1990s was really when the Internet went mainstream.

Some of the “Fun Places” shown in the book were expected, like an early e-card site and the Smithsonian home page, while others were a bit strange, like a random elementary school in Cottage Grove, Minnesota.

Do you remember the very first website you visited when you got on the information super-highway?  Back then, I was hard-pressed to think of anything to look for, and decided to type in colgate.com.  Why not read about my toothpaste?  At that time, we didn’t know what to expect once you got to a webpage, right?

And now, of course, we have little computers in our hands that can do everything we did in 1995 times infinity.  Mark your calendars:  the next generation of iPhone comes out in a few weeks.