The Real McCrea

A few months passed between when I first heard about the web in January 1994 and when I actually saw it for the very first time. And that’s probably a good thing, since early 1994 was the exact period of time in which “dot coms” exploded on to the world wide web¹, rapidly extending the diversity of web content far beyond its original subject matter, particle physics.

In April of 1994, when I finally downloaded Mosaic, I headed straight to the one site known to make it super-easy to discover and experience all of that new and diverse content: Yahoo. But I didn’t get there by typing “yahoo.com”.

It is true that the site had just embraced the short, fun, and memorable name, Yahoo, after operating for a few months with the unwieldy moniker “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. But, hard to believe now, once they chose the new name, Jerry Yang and David Filo did not immediately secure the yahoo domain. (In fact the site would not start to operate as yahoo.com until January 1995!) As a result, all of us who heard about Yahoo by word-of-mouth sometime in 1994 had to also know and correctly type the URL associated with Jerry’s workstation on Stanford campus: akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo².

Below is the Yahoo I saw (or as close as we can now get; this screenshot is from some unknown date between April and December 1994). It may look ungainly to you now, but for me, and for so many others, this was the page that made the web a case of  “love at first site”:

With this proto-Yahoo, if you had interest in a specific site or topic, you could quickly navigate the site’s hierarchy and find what you were looking for. But if you were curious, bored, or just new to the web (as most of us were), the awesome top-level navigation was where the action was. With the total number of servers on the web doubling every three months, What’s new? What’s cool? What’s popular? and “Random link” provided the perfect options for exploration and serendipity. Like so many others, I quickly became addicted, coming back multiple times a day to find new sites, and to watch the exponential growth of the web across a large and growing number of content categories.

What sorts of cool, new sites might one discover via Yahoo?

One of my early favorites was “IUMA” (short for the Internet Underground Music Archive). Years before Napster, this site let you discover and download digital music (in the MP2 format) from hundreds of indie bands. Hard to believe, but CNN had already done a short piece of them in March 1994. Well worth a watch:

(BTW, I’ll have more to say about IUMA in a future post, but that story comes later in the year.)

I’d love to show you more of the web from Spring of 1994, but almost all of the sites that inspired me then are now long gone.

To be continued…

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¹Insight from the model I built, starting with data from M.I.T.’s Matthew Gray

²From a great article on Yahoo on History-Computer.com