1993 is often marked as the year the Internet “went mainstream.” The Mosaic web browser (released by NCSA in January) [link] was the first to make the World Wide Web accessible to ordinary people—images inline with text, point-and-click navigation, bookmarks. It spread like wildfire. Tim Berners-Lee’s protocols (HTTP, HTML) had been around for a couple of years, but Mosaic lit the match.
Until then, the Internet was largely academic and government-funded. Companies like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were still running their own walled gardens, but suddenly the “open” Internet looked much more attractive.
1993 saw the launch of the first graphical web magazines (e.g. Wired’s early web presence, the Internet Underground Music Archive). Newsgroups (Usenet) were still the beating heart of online culture: technical forums, fandoms, flame wars, and the infamous “Eternal September” (AOL unleashing new users onto Usenet).
Fewer than 100 websites existed at the start of 1993. By year’s end, there were over 600—an exponential curve was beginning. Internet users worldwide numbered around 14 million. Compare that to billions today. In hindsight, 1993 feels like the “hinge year.”
Before: academics, researchers, and a few hackers exchanging text. After: browsers, commercialization, and the first glimpse of the Internet as a global medium for culture, business, and daily life.
In 1993 I had been working for Learfield Communications for eight years. The company operated regional radio networks throughout the midwest and there wasn’t much interest in what most of my co-workers referred to as “that Internet thing.” I, however, was smitten and quickly became very annoying on the topic. Over the course of the next five years I pissed away a lot of company resources (money and man-hours).
After retiring in 2012 I made some notes on that period. A half-assed history, if you will. This morning I uploaded those notes to ChatGPT and it came back with a timeline.
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