Recreation of Google's 1998 home office; via Google blog. 1998 was the last year of the web before Google began setting the agenda in search. During that year, there were hints that Google was emerging — even before it officially incorporated in September, it was gaining credence among industry insiders as a search...

CDnow homepage, December 1998; via Wayback Machine. 1998 started promisingly for CDnow, a leading online music retailer — or "e-tailer" as e-commerce sites were sometimes called at the time. "CDnow goes public with a bang," read a CNET headline on February 10, 1998: "After upping its offering price, CDnow (CDNW)...

BowieNet homepage on launch; via Wayback Machine. BowieNet launched as an ISP in North America on September 1, 1998 for $19.95 per month; and if you lived elsewhere, as a “premium content” service for $5.95 per month. If you had visited davidbowie.com on that day, you’d have been greeted by these words from the man...

Excite portal, July 1998. When BowieNet was “pre-launched” on his main website at the end of June 1998, commentators saw it as an attempt to “creatively up the ante in the portal war,”⁠ as Beth Lipton wrote in a CNET report. “Large Net gateway sites such as Yahoo and Excite seek to be the home page for as many users...

In October, the Netscape vs. Microsoft rivalry reached fever pitch when Netscape employees defaced an Internet Explorer logo that had been dumped on its lawn by Microsofties. In 1997, the World Wide Web finally went past 1 million websites — with over 120 million internet users. As the number of websites went up,...

Decaf or Java — which version of MTV's website should you choose? Part of the reason it was so difficult for both digital music and video webcasts to gain traction on the web over 1997 was the fickleness of the underlying software: the web browser. Throughout the year, a host of technical and business decisions were...

My well-thumbed copies of three classic web design books: 'Creating Killer Web Sites' by David Siegel (1996-97), 'Taking your Talent to the Web' by Jeffrey Zeldman (2001), and 'Designing Web Usability' by Jakob Nielsen (1999). Like many of the first wave of web designers, Jeffrey Zeldman — who turned 42 in early...

U2 promoting their 1997 album 'Pop' with a VDOLive and RealVideo website; June 1997 screenshot via Wayback Machine. Online music companies like N2K and Liquid Audio were mostly concerned with music downloads, but it was now possible to stream music in the browser — that is, have it play in real-time. By 1997,...

Duran Duran promoting their 1997 online single, Electric Barbarella; image via a fan site. At the same time as the prototype of BowieNet was being developed, key advancements were being made in online music distribution — a trend Bowie had helped kickstart the previous year with the free Telling Lies download. The...

An image from the Internet 1996 World Exposition book; via Internet Archive. 1996 was a year of continued growth for the World Wide Web, although the number of websites had yet to crack the 1 million mark — in June 1996 there were an estimated 257,601 websites on the Net. But the Internet was beginning to be...

The CD version of David Bowie's online single, 'Telling Lies', 1996; via kupindo.com. In an interview featured in the 1998 book “The Interactive Music Handbook,” Larry Rosen — CEO of an online music services company called N2K — provided his theory on how the internet would overhaul the music distribution system....

Rocktropolis, a mid-1990s online music website. The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) is the undoubted pioneer of online music, with its website launching at the end of 1993. But over two years later, in early 1996, IUMA was struggling to make headway using the internet as a distribution channel for music....