Early Internet Quotes

When I was at MIT, they had a beta test of Mosaic, the first popular browser. I remember looking at it, and there was a weather map or something. Now, in fairness to me, there weren't any websites then. But I remember saying, 'This is stupid - what's the point?' Now, of course, it's obvious.

You have to think back to the '90s. The computer was this terrible-looking thing that was trying to compete with the television. And it was this idea of email and chat rooms and this kind of stuff that first people - got people there.

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'

We were the first people to do advertising on the Web. I actually saw in 1993 that the ad could be the content, the destination.

When I was 14, I spent a huge amount of time on the Internet, but not the Internet we know today. It was 1994, so while the World Wide Web existed, it wasn't generally accessible. Prodigy and CompuServe were popular, and AOL was on the rise, but I didn't have access to the web, and no one I knew had access to the web.

While GeoCities isn't cool, it isn't a bad thing. It did a great thing - enabled great people to instantly publish to the Web.

I left General Magic in 1996 to become an Internet hobbyist - got a T-1 line to my house. At one point I had all four food banks of the Bay Area hosted from this house here.

Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.

I got involved when I was a graduate student at UCLA when UCLA was the first site on the net.

I related to the whole hippie, acid-test confluence of the early Internet. The idea that we should be open and interoperate with our data resonated with me.

Oddly enough, my partner went on Prodigy when it first came out, and I ended up playing with some of that stuff!.

When we heard that little dial-up sound, that eeeeee, and then you connected, and you then go and you check your mail and you get that 'you got mail,' you were excited. I mean, that was the thing.

I'm a MySpace person.

Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.

Back in the days before the Internet, there was no place to put a short film, so Mike Gribble and Spike Decker had this festival of animation. My student films got selected.

The first conversation I ever had about the Internet was in 1993 with Robert Wright, who was then a colleague at the 'New Republic.'

I started using the Internet when I was 12 years old. I would go into chat rooms and flirt. It was the beginning of the Internet for young people.

I learned most of what I knew about online communities on The Well, and it was a good place to learn. The group of people in Sausalito and Bolinas who'd gotten the Whole Earth Catalog off the ground - a bunch of boomer hippies, intellectuals and nerds - established the 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link', and showed us what online communities were.

I worked at ABCNews.com at a time when nobody knew what 'dot com' was.

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.

I was really just a hard-core geek, if you will, in 1996, and was building websites as a hobby. I started doing a lot of web design and development and built my first website on the now-defunct GeoCities platform.

RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet.

Back then, the entire Internet consisted of two slow, boxcar-sized UNIVAC computers about 50 feet apart, connected by a wire. It would take one of these computers an entire day to send an email to the other one, which would immediately delete it, because it was a Viagra ad.

I did comics on the Internet because it was free, and if I had made printed copies, I wouldn't have known what to do with them. But I knew how to make a website when most people didn't, and back then, that was enough!