It's hard to believe Glerin has been around since 1996, and even crazier to think back on how different things were back then when I first started developing websites professionally. I had been playing around with website development for about a year before that.
To put things in perspective, a little trivia from 1996:
- The average American with internet access spent less than 30 minutes a month surfing the web.
- Many people thought AOL was the internet. It was the most popular site, reaching 41% of users.
- Travelocity opened online, and primarily travel agents were booking passengers on American Airlines.
- Apple stock sunk to a 10-year low of $18.
- Microsoft introduced the wheel mouse.
- Google was first developed.
- Netscape was the most popular browser.
- The 5 major search engines were Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite.
- IMDB.com came online.
- If you had internet access you were on dialup, waiting forever for your modem to connect.
- Average page load time was 30 seconds. (3 seconds today & people will leave your site!)
- Developers like me were coding their sites from scratch - no WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get).
- The internet was commonly referred to as the "World Wide Web."
- There were 2o million internet users in America; to put this in perspective, there were over 245 million in mid-2012.
- Time magazine featured Amazon as one of the best websites, amazed at being able to search for books by author, subject or title.
And to think many smart business people wrote the internet off as a fad! It's mind boggling to try to imagine how much things will change in the next 16 years. Are you still waffling on your web presence? If so, you need to start thinking seriously about the future of your business because there's no way it will survive in the long run without adapting to the new economy, of which the internet is the hub. Even now, 40% of consumers research online before purchasing offline.
For a little more nostalgia, check out these screenshots from 1996.
Time's review of Amazon's "revolutionary new way" to sell books:
Screenshot of Yahoo from 1996:
Screenshot of Godaddy from 1996:
