The Web in 1996

Marianne and I are writing about Collected Visions for Photoworks journal. To get my mind moving to answer her questions. I started researching what the web looked like in 1996 when Collected Visions launched.

GENERAL REFERENCES
Internet Society > Brief History of the Internet

Wikipedia > History of the Internet 

The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

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Slate Magazine – Jurassic Web, Feb 2009

Media Bistro How Does the Internet of 1996 Compare to 2011? [INFOGRAPHIC]

From ekarj.com (?)  Written 7-10-06

The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future by Tim Berners-Lee (written in 1996)

Voyager Co. that was the major player in the production of interactive CD-Roms disbanded in 1997! Case study

going back a step>

What the Internet looked like in 1995 Washington Post (with video form PBS Computer Chronicles

Smithsonian Blog from December 12,2012:Fun Places on the Internet (in 1995)

new news

Returning to work after exhibiting is always hard.

Experimenting with my files and new found photoshop skills. I’ve discovered tonight that the overlay layer lets me make combinations like I used to putting two slides together on my light table.

Here I find myself staring at myself stare at the screen and while I am staring at the screen i find myself making the same gesture.  And it is as if I am trapped in the screen – trapped in the news. The red in the photo is like blood on my hands and/or my mouth.  I am both silenced and scarred.

Skeuomorphs (for Diana Taylor)

Why Innovation Doffs an Old Hat by JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
NY Times: February 12, 2011

Just as the average human carries around the remnants of a prehistoric tail and a useless appendix, the tools we use also bear marks of the evolutionary process from which they arose. more

reading further…

…superfluous references to the past are known as skeuomorphs (from the Greek words for tool and form), and Apple’s fondness for them on the iPad has provoked criticism from some designers.

“It drives a lot of designers batty because it is so skeuomorphically heavy,” said Craig Mod, a designer for Flipboard, a magazine for the iPad.

I’m staring at my skeuomorphically heavy screen (now I know there is an adjective too): trashcan, folders, my desktop… but as I read the article and came across the photo below with a protester  drawing computer keys to express his wish: I wonder what it should be called, a de-skeuomorph?

Not surprised that I found when internet searching the blog skeuomorphs.com/ > technology vs. nostalgia