User:Stev0/Early Web Info

My Street Cred

• I made my first homepage November, 1994.
• As I said in my User Page, I was editor of the award-winning Useless Pages for four years.
• I was an early employee (the 14th) of Yahoo!, Inc.
• In April 1996, Websight magazine named me #37 on their list of 100 most influential people on the World Wide Web (disclaimer: I wrote a monthly column, then a bi-monthly column for Websight magazine).

Resources I own

• The book "Yahoo! Unplugged"" (copyright 1995), 466 pages (not including index) with about eight to ten sites on a page. I believe I still have the CD ROM that came with it which is a snapshot of the entire Yahoo! heirarchy of that time.

• "Netguide" ("A Michael Wolff Book") from 1994. The glossery in back defines "World-Wide Web" as "A hypertext system for searching the Internet, currently under development..."

• Numerous magazines from 1995 about the "hottest thing on the web" at the time.

(These are just off the top of my head; more will be added later)

The End of the Beginning

What should be the date that "early web history" ends?

Two dates are equally viable here. The first is August 9, 1995 when Netscape Communications Corporation had their IPO. This is officially the start of the DotCom Years.

The second is February 8, 1996, when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed. This included the infamous Communications Decency Act and the Blue Ribbon campaign that went along with it, as well as people turning their pages black. I have a copy of 24 Hours in Cyberspace, which not coincidentally took place the same day, that has a photo of Al Gore (Who, by the way, never said he invented the Internet). He has a computer monitor on his desk, and if you look closely you can see he's looking at Yahoo! - which had turned black that day. Wham! Take that!

I personally prefer the latter, if only because that way we can put in more things.