Fragments of an adolescent web

I have un­earthed a few old ar­ti­cles typed dur­ing my ado­les­cence, be­tween 1996 and 1998. Un­re­mark­able at the time, they now read, three decades later, as a chron­i­cle of a van­ished era.¹

The word “blog” does not ex­ist yet. Wikipedia has yet to come. Google has not been born. AltaVista reigns over searches, while al­ready strug­gling to keep up with the rapidly grow­ing web.² To meet some­one, you had to agree in ad­vance and pre­pare your route on pa­per maps. 🗺️

The web is tak­ing off. The CSS spec­i­fi­ca­tion has just emerged, HTML ta­bles still serve for page lay­out. Cook­ies and ad­ver­tis­ing ban­ners are mak­ing their ap­pear­ance. Pages start em­bed­ding mu­sic and videos, forc­ing browsers to sup­port plug­ins. Net­scape Nav­i­ga­tor holds 86% of the mar­ket, but Win­dows 95 now bun­dles In­ter­net Ex­plorer to quickly catch up. In re­sponse, Net­scape open-sources its browser.

France falls be­hind. Out­side uni­ver­si­ties, In­ter­net ac­cess re­mains ex­pen­sive and la­bo­ri­ous. Mini­tel still reigns, of­fer­ing a phone di­rec­tory, train tick­ets, re­mote shop­ping. This was not yet pos­si­ble with the In­ter­net: buy­ing a CD on­line was a pipe dream. En­cryp­tion suf­fers from in­ap­pro­pri­ate reg­u­la­tion: the DES al­go­rithm is capped at 40 bits and cracked in a few seconds.

These pages bear the trace of the web’s ado­les­cence. Thirty years have passed. The same bat­tles con­tinue: data sell­ing, ad­ver­tis­ing, mo­nopolies.