[ih] Visualization of Internet History 1993-now

[Brian E Carpenter]

Er, hum, excuse me, for January 1993 it shows AOL as having 20 million of something. http://info.cern.ch was almost certainly still the leading site then, and there were only about 50 sites in total, mainly in academia. AOL was widely sneered at for *not* being an ISP. Anyway, aol.com wasn't registered until 1995-06-22.

prodigy.com was registered 1992-09-16, but according to Wikipedia:
"In 1994, Prodigy became the first of the early-generation dialup services to offer full access to the World Wide Web and to offer Web page hosting to its members. Since Prodigy was not a true Internet service provider, programs that needed an Internet connection, such as Internet Explorer and Quake multiplayer, could not be used with the service."

compuserve.com was registered 1988-10-06. I have no idea when they first had an HTTP server, but they really didn't have proper Internet connectivity even in late 1995. They did start sending somebody (Rich Petke) to the IETF during 1995.
(I'm looking at an email from Barry F. Berkov <bfb at csi.compuserve.com> dated 21 Oct 95 10:56:43 EDT.)

The graphic also shows imdb having 21,261 of something in January 1993. imdb.com was registered on 1996-01-05. mtv.com was registered on 1995-02-14. bloomberg.com on 1993-09-29.

So at least for 1993-4, it seems that the numbers are rubbish.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 24-Jan-21 09:19, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> FYI, I stumbled across an interesting dynamic graphic, visualizing the
> top Internet sites over time.   Fascinating to see the shifts as the
> Internet evolved, so might be of interest to Internet Historians.  See:
> 
> https://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-popular-websites-since-1993/
>