#rememberatimewaybackwhen No really can you Remember a Time Way Back When the internet wasn’t what it is today. It was some much fun then and not at all cluttered with the busy lives of internet marketers or even marketeers. I don’t know the exact date but it must have been around ’89 or ’90 when the top internet provider was Compuserve. Oh those where the days. 14K Modems on dial-up. Cost per minute from your telephone provider plus the 5 or 6 quid Compuserve would charge per month.
In true internet spirit we didn’t really have Search, it was what ever Compuserve would throw at you through their portal. You could only get access if you loaded their browser software and as the internet progressed we eventually got a window on the world when compuserve opened up their network. They integrated Microsoft Internet Explorer into the system that allowed their users to reach out far and beyond the confindes of compuserve.
Once we discovered what was really out there, we needed a way to save all the places we had visited. Commonly known as our Favourites but there was no means of sharing those favourites with friends and family. We would just save them to this folder you could access from withn your browser and at this point ‘Bookmarklets’ was not even mentioned. Then some clown had the bright idea of publishing their favourites on line as a directory – Internet Directory was borne. Teams of people would spend every hour publishing links to web pages they had visited. Nothing fancy here, just plain old text links and if by magic a wave of web sites would start appearing all over the internet with everyone linking to everyone else.
The only reason I want to mention this is that I recently found one of those internet directories that is being maintained by a retired librarian at Sylvia Milne’s Web Page
Now bare in mind here there was no Google at this point. Infact there was no internet search, well not as we know it so there had to be a way so that people/surfers could find a web site. Internet Directories were an ideal way of sharing information and links to other web sites.
But you know what, the Internet hasn’t really changed all that much. All we have done is paint flowers around it and made it a lot more techie. When it comes down to it search engine bots or spiders whatever, really are text link scrapers. Feeding off all those anchor text links that all those librarians have collated in the last 20 years or so. I rather like the idea that the internet was complied by a librarian cataloging all their library cards.
You can get a real sense of that in Sylvias write up here. Why not tell us about your own internet directory or even start one. Who knows you could be the next Yahoo.
For now take care.
