Time Capsule: The Internet in 1995

On Jan­u­ary 27, 1994, the Today Show ran a hilar­i­ous seg­ment try­ing to unrav­el this crazy new thing called “The Inter­net.” A year lat­er, how­ev­er, it looks like the media had it all fig­ured out. Check out this 1995 MTV trend piece by Kurt Loder: We got a kick out of the clunkiess of the old new media (Com­puserve! Dial-up! Netscape!), but Loder also touch­es on hack­ing, inter­net pornog­ra­phy, pri­va­cy, and free­dom of speech issues that still haven’t been resolved. The biggest shock­er of the clip is not how much things have changed but how much they haven’t.

Oh, and also, Moby had hair?

via The Awl

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.


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  • Eric says:

    One of the inter­est­ing things about this news clip that may go unno­ticed is the sig­nif­i­cance of Kurt Loder doing the piece. Kurt was also an Inter­net pio­neer. He invent­ed and coined the term “Pod­cast”, and he was the orig­i­nal own­er of MTV.com. He reg­is­tered MTV.com after ask­ing the man­age­ment if he could do it. They said “go ahead, we don’t care about that Inter­net thing”. Kurt did it and ran MTV.com for him­self. Then MTV and their lawyers woke up one day and real­ized their sig­nif­i­cant error.

  • Wil says:

    @Eric I think that it was Adam Cur­ry who claimed mtv.com en invent­ed the term Pod­cast.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curry

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