I find this quite interesting. Parts of this video make me feel like we have come a long way in these past 13 years, while others make me question if things have really changed in any significant way. via Waxy Links.
Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.
I spent most of the day yesterday working on a workflow to digitize VHS tapes, settling on VCR to MiniDV camera my Macbook Pro with Firewire. These tapes are pretty worn, so the quality’s not great, but that almost adds to their charm.
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I love this. I bet you if I showed this to my staff, they would be in awe and asking pertinent questions… I would have to then spill the beans and tell them the video was from 1996.
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It’s certainly more text based (14.4 modem – right). I remember teaching my first Intro to Internet course in the spring of 1996 and how hard it was to find web sites. The whole idea of ISPs was new, so were gophers, spyders. The whole concept was foreign. It took a lot of preparation (after talking to a tech guy at the consulting firm I was working for) to distill it down to the “regular people”. It’s certainly a fun walk back in time. For some reason, looking at Clorox’s business web site is the one thing that stands out and how little info they actually had online. It also surprises me that it was in 1995, the photos seem more 1980s and the font choice is more 1970. I’ll become a customer of other old videos you choose to put online. It could turn into a project of some sort in computer class. Don’t know what, but there’s potential.