I remember that. A few weeks later ran a script to count all the websites on the Internet.. 324 at that time.

LeoPanthera 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Was your script the very first web crawler or did you just have a list?

I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites.

Connecting... Waiting... It was slow, both because of dial-up kbit/s and ping to websites, and every page felt like you were literally sending a request to another part of the planet. It felt like that was actually happening, and it was very different from what we experience now.

But most importantly, there were zero funds/VC in that Internet. Only very niche websites, zero online services, even email was difficult to obtain and felt like a real privilege. Only the fact of being connected made everyone feel not a stranger.

I kind of miss that Internet, but I'm grateful that once I was part of it.

	▲	us-merul 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says: “I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.” Interesting too that an article on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.

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LowLevelKernel 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wow. Which year was it?

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alain94040 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In 1993, you could refresh the home page of Netscape (Mosaic) every day and it would mention new sites that had been added. That became unmanageable quickly, which is when two dudes from Stanford started a directory.

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hackingonempty 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The NCSA What's New page!

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/388/21...

	▲	jsrcout 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I've been trying to track down "What's New" for a long long time. If memory serves, there was a daily email titled "What's New on the World Wide Web" - very possibly the source for this monthly summary. It was a fascinating way to experience the early WWW's exponential growth. It started out small, but once it began to grow, you could see it expanding faster and faster practically in real time. At first it only took seconds to give the daily list a good once over. Over time it started taking minutes, then 20 minutes or half an hour (if things weren't too busy at work), and eventually it morphed into almost another full time job. There was just no way to keep up. Around that time they stopped sending it out. From a historical point of view, these daily emails and monthly summaries would be a terrific resource for those interested in the early Web. It's hard to believe now that there was once a time when you could literally check out every new Web site as they came online.