Cybercultural
Cybercultural
Richard MacManus
Cybercultural chronicles internet history and its cultural impact, from the pre-web era to the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, and beyond. Written by pioneering tech blogger Richard MacManus.
Latest Posts
The first wave of people to join Twitter was in March 2007, when it became the trendy app at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I hadn’t gone to SXSW that year, but I arrived in San Francisco the month after for Web 2.0 Expo. I...
Twenty years ago, on 20 April 2003, I published the first post on a blog I had just started. Entitled The Read/Write Web, it was a manifesto of sorts. The post was filled with optimism for the web and made the case that a new era was...
Microblogging was a trend that emerged in the second half of the 2000s, after long-form weblogs had become established in the culture. Microblogging is basically just short-form blogging and, as I’ll lay out in this post, its heyday was...
I recently had occasion to write about Foursquare, the once popular location check-in app. I’d been emailed by its PR firm about a potential Machine Learning story. In her pitch, the PR rep had called Foursquare a “location data...
As I’ve been writing my “Web 2.0 memoir” this year, I’ve been using Flickr a lot to look at old photos from that era — mainly conferences I went to, people I met and places I visited, but also occasionally I will get lost down a rabbit...
David Bowie's website circa August-September 1998. In late 1996, just before his 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden and before his latest album ‘Earthling’ was released, David Bowie had quietly approved the development of...
Original NCSA Mosaic Version 1.0 web browser home page; via NCSA. On 14 January 1993, Marc Andreessen put a call out on the WWW-Talk mailing list for people to test a new WWW browser in development. It was initially “hypertext only,” he...
MidasWWW browser in 1992; via Ancient Web Browsers. Throughout 1992, there were just a scattering of websites on the World Wide Web — somewhere between ten and twenty. A W3C page from late 1992 lists less than 30 web servers online at...
Tim Berners-Lee demonstrates the World Wide Web to delegates at the Hypertext 1991 conference in San Antonio, Texas; via CERN After a year and a half of stalling from CERN management, followed by a flurry of development activity over the...
In the final few months of 1990, 35-year Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau developed the world’s first web client (a browser/editor), created the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), wrote the first web server, and tied it...
At the beginning of 1999, one company had all the momentum on the Web: Microsoft. While Netscape was adjusting to corporate life with new owner AOL and trying to figure out its browser strategy, Microsoft was preparing to release version...
After the birth of web apps in 1993 with CGI scripts, followed by startups like Yahoo using Perl code to create dynamic websites in 1994, and then client-side interactivity arriving in 1995 with Netscape’s JavaScript, the web was...
The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) would not be coined as an acronym for another few years, but all the pieces were in place by the end of 1995 — albeit at varying stages of maturity and adoption. Version 1.0 of Linux...
Apache logo; via Wayback Machine. From January 1995 through till the end of December, the Web grew from just over 10,000 websites to 100,000. But in order to publish a website at that time, you needed to host it on a web server. In...
In January 1994, two Stanford University graduate students — Jerry Yang and David Filo — created a web directory named “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” It went by various other names in early 1994 (such as “Hierarchical...