No thoughts, just anxiety

Spotted in Toronto

(Remix version)

✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

✨ Artists and titles will be revealed with the full song after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update!

✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

✨ Artists and titles will be revealed with the full song after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update!

German children’s tv show mascot Bernd das Brot would do numbers if he had a tumblr account:

(With reference to this post here.)

In the very early days, the public-facing Internet was small enough that you could just, like, remember where everything was. Contrary to the modern Internet's rapid content churn and walled-garden siloing, early websites tended to have deep, statically preserved content archives and dense cross-site linking, so it wasn't uncommon to set about finding previously visited sites simply by retracing one's path from memory. Even simple bookmarking was sometimes derided as a crutch for people who were too lazy to learn how to navigate the Internet "properly"; indeed, once web browsers added built-in support for bookmark lists, some people refused to use them as a matter of principle!

Once the Internet grew to the point where this approach was no longer feasible, there was a period of a few years where various parties tried to construct human-curated, hierarchical directories of the entire Internet. This was, of course, doomed to fail, as the Internet was growing faster than it could be manually catalogued, but they gave it the old college try. Some popular search engines such as Yahoo actually started out as directories of this type, and only later added search functionality. Meanwhile, communities of interest adopted a more targeted approach, with dedicated "links" pages containing curated recommendations for other, similar sites becoming ubiquitous on personal websites, while users who lacked the time or expertise to offer curated links could participate in webrings and other volunteer-operated directory services.

The bulk of the page count is concerned with how to use the internet, both on a concrete level (e.g. "here is a list of file transfer tools, how to use them, and a discussion of their tradeoffs") and a conceptual level (e.g. "what is the internet actually useful for", or "how do you figure out answers to questions about it this book didn't think to ask"). However, there is also a catalogue of sites -- some WWW, but many other protocols are also represented -- sorted by topic.

Here's the start of the directory of directories, listing sites that are, themselves, directories of sites:

You were aware of websites through word-of-mouth and things like “carefully enunciated URLS on television.”

A presenter would announce over the text, “to learn more, go to H-t-t-p colon slash slash, kratts creatures dot com” - or whatever, and it would linger for a moment so you could write it down if you wanted.

In those days you went “on the internet” to do specific things. That definitely included wasting time and poking around, but the expectation was that if you wanted a website you were told about it and the website was a place with additional information rather than a first port of call. Librarians knew websites and could suggest them. Museums and attractions distributed paper bookmarks, business cards or flyers with the website url written on them.

Early search engines were AltaVista, which used Boolean operators, and Ask Jeeves, where you could ask “natural” questions.