Along with the lack of any coherent or useful organization or indexing, this medium suffers from a lack of its own history. Sure there is the Internet Archive capturing something like one front page screen shot in every 12,486,081,230 and those high level no details stuff time lines about when the first email was sent.. but you were not there. What we need to do is create anecdotes to capture what the experience was really like when you first plugged in. Here are some of mine:
- German Web TV – around 1996 or so someone had set up a system where you could watch screen shots from German TV. I do not recall any audio. I do recall they were about the first site to try to do this and there seemed to be about 15 channels or so. They refreshed every 3 to 10 seconds. Soccer was hard to follow. Blue movies at suppertime were a bit of a startler in the days of far fewer cable channels in smalltown Canada.
- Operating stuff through web cams – sort of related to the above but interactive. You could run the switching of a toy train set in Germany and usually you had to wait a few minutes for your command to come up in the line up of global command givers. Somewhere else there was a garden in a small room which you could look around with a camera, dig a bit and even plant a seed. Probably the most nicest most innocent amateur sites you will ever see.
- Usenet – an actually working uncensored universal bulletin board system where you could find the greatest nerds in any topic you wanted debating the issue of their affection in fine and incredibly nasty detail. Killed by cross posting porn spammers and, I think, take over by Google.
- The coffee pot and the aquarium – just so someone else won’t mention them first, there were two sites with extremely early web video. The cameras were static, one aimed at a coffee pot and one aimed at a tank of fish. We stared for hours.
Some of these things may sill be there but I don’t go looking for them anymore.
Share your web anecdotes. It’s been ten years now since I started playing with this damn thing so its about time to get nostalgic. If you have a link to that German toy train, it would be a nice touch.