It was a magical time, PC sales were just booming and if you were lucky, yours would come with a modem for dial-up Internet access. You would hear the scrambling sound of your phone line connecting you to the world. Launching Netscape and staring at the throbber animation while a single web page loaded.
Today, you can simply type the name of a destination and instantly get a map with turn-by-turn directions to get there. These advancements predated the smartphone, thanks to a service called MapQuest.
#TBT ICQ, short for "I Seek You," laid the groundwork for instant messaging clients when it debuted in November 1996. Think about how long ago that was... Windows 95 was barely a year old, Nintendo had just introduced the N64, and those with a reason to have a cell phone actually used it to talk on.
At the turn of the millennium, Yahoo! was the most visited site on the web. In Web 1.0 terms, Yahoo! was like Google and Facebook combined. So what happened?
In the 1990s, the internet was smaller, slower, and harder to search. If you wanted to learn basic facts about a topic, what would you do? You could get a physical encyclopedia. Thankfully, there was one more option.
#TBT Today, multiplayer gaming is easy. But in the 90s, it was cumbersome and not exactly user friendly until an app called GameSpy hit the scene which made browsing for servers and connecting with players a far more intuitive process. It was a game-changer.
What are pixels? The display on your screen is made of them, but are they real estate? In 2005, Alex Tew thought they were, and became a millionaire.
Yahoo! Messenger was never the most popular, but for many years it was close enough to keep trying, introducing many messaging features years before they became the norm.
For years, Adobe Flash was synonymous with interactive websites, web video, and browser games. At its peak, Flash Player was on 99% of desktop browsers. A decade later and it's all but gone.
GeoCities was more than a hosting service, offering community features and building tools, it could be seen as the forefather of social media. In 1999, the site was the third-most popular on the web.
It wasn't that difficult to be perceived as a technology bigwig in the mid-90s. All you needed to impress the masses was a spiffy email address, and there was no provider hotter than the aptly-named Hotmail.
In 2007, Flickr was the most popular photo-sharing site on the web and growing exponentially. There was no Instagram or Unsplash around, and essentially that's what Flickr could have become.
It was the late 90s, social media platforms like Facebook didn't yet exist, texting was in its infancy, email was very popular, instant messaging was up for the taking and Microsoft took notice.
#TBT Launched in 1997, Winamp is a media player that supports a wide array of audio formats and was an iconic application in the heyday of MP3 music. Winamp was nearly ubiquitous, used by millions in the early 2000s.
One of the greatest tools to be spun out of AOL was its instant messaging client, affectionately known as AIM. Released in the spring of 1997 it allowed users to register an online handle, create buddy lists, and chat with friends in near real-time.
