As the 1980s passed and the 1990s came, the Internet went into a new game. ARPANET shut down in 1990, NSFNET shut down in 1995, the Information Superhighway never really formalized and the Internet was effectively privatized. By April 1993, when CERN made the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis a whole new world of opportunities was born. Several big developments start te unfold which developed the way we look at the internet today.

The old web really consisted mostly of text. With the World Wide Web, the need for multimedia grew quickly. Only months after the it opened up in 1993, the Wharton School published one of the first collections of PDFs, which was highlighted in Adobe's 1995 annual report about use of PDFs on the web. Other forms of multimedia were already being developed. The main issue was data compression, which was needed in the time of mail-up internet. Among the early formats that were developed, mainly to compress data, were MPEG videos in 1991 and the JPEG age format in 1992. In 1994, MP3 was introduced, becoming the first popular audio format on the web.

Using multimedia of course also meant having the option to view or listen to it. In 1993 Mark Andreesen of the National Center for SuperComputing Applications (NCSA) launched Mosaic X (which later became NetScape), considered by many to be the first popular internet browser. It took only 2 years for a more popular option to arrive, as in 1995 Microsoft first released Internet Explorer, which became leading browser for the decade to come. Almost simultaneously with browser development, the search engines started to pop up. The Archie Like Indexing for the Web (ALIWEB) which started in 1993 is often listed as the first Web Search Engine and many users of the 1990s might remember using Lycos, AOL and Altavista for search.

As one can imagine the type of online communities started to differ from before. Wheres the 1980s were mainly focused on education, research and military topics, new uses of the Internet were quickly identified. As the market for personal computers grew, the web exploded from 3.000 web-sites in 1994 to 25.000 in 1995 and kept on growing every year since. This allowed the World Wide Web to both attract users of other platforms and provide space for new concepts. One of the first well known websites was The Internet Movie Database (IMDB), providing information that we know might take for granted now. The list of first websites contains a lot now household names as Bloomberg.com, Wired.com and also the BBC, IBM and Microsoft who presented themselves as early adopters.

The real change came in 1994/1995 when Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay were founded, opening up endless possibilities for business, education and communities.

[...to be continued...]

About Social Media in Suriname

This story is part 30 of my #Maynia goal to write a book in the month of May. The topics I'll be writing about from May 1st until May 31st, 2020:

(Want to read them all? The chapters will become clickable as the month progresses. Please note that I'm not always writing in chronological order, so check all 31 to see which are clickable)

The history of the Internet according to the Internet
1 - Predicting the Future
2 - The origin of the online community
3 - The birth of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web
4 - Endless opportunities
5 - For education and entertainment
6 - Social Media before Social Media

The Rise of Web 2.0
7 - In Search of the first online Empire
8 - User Generated Content
9 - Let’s Get Connected

The Golden Generation
10 - From friends and relatives to personal interest
11 - The birth of the like button
12 - Being number 1

The Battle for the internet
13 - Socialnomics and the fight for online supremacy
14 - The features and takeovers that shaped the landscape
15 - It’s more than just Social

The Mainstream and The Alternatives
16 - The rise of the creator and the influencer
17 - The comeback of traditional media
18 - The age of information overload

The Marketeer and the Community
19 - Can’t we all have a little fun?
20 - Is age really just a number
21 - The Dangers of Dopamine and Instant Gratification

Suriname: From Dail Up to Tik Tok
22 - Getting connected
23 - Before Facebook Conquered the World
24 - The Growth of Social Media minded Suriname
25 - The Rise of Social Media Entertainment
26 - Twisting The Rules
27 - Free Facebook
28 - The diversification of Social Media
29 - From Brand Ambassadors to Social Media Influencers
30 - The Fight against Fake

The Recap
31 - What’s next?

Maynia Log

Learn more about Maynia by reading about it here.

Today's word count: 464

Total word count: 3.953

Daily review:

Too little time, started too late. It is visible in the word count. But proud that I still managed to put this Chapter up.

Daily question:

This month I'll post a daily question on which you can comment. Everyday I will give away a Hive SBI to my favorite. 😉

Yesterday's comment winner is Hive account@kaelci! You've won 1 Hive SBI for commenting on my post!
The Hive SBI will sponsored as soon as my Hive comes out of saving.
Sorry Hive account@owasco, I thought I would have had it by now. I'll make sure to pick it up as soon as possible.