History of the Internet

It's funny how easily one can almost completely forget how something used to be. For instance when someone gets a new haircut we usually have a hard time remembering what that person used to look like before. Same theory applies to the internet. These documentaries help remind us of the shortcomings and frustrations we all had to deal with on a day-to-day basis when you started your Dial-up connection. Early advertisers drooled over the potential this never ending blank canvas could offer them, but developers were hesitant to allow advertisements for fear of driving the customer away. Can you imagine an internet without advertising? After the Google guys  came along and changed everything with their unique algorithms and brilliant business plan , the internet was no longer an endless "link-to-link" process. One could actually search for something in particular and find it with relative ease. Yahoo, Alta-Vista, and Excite! were all around and established before Googling was a household term, and Google came to the game with a completely different strategy and mindset, one that put the user first and made function ability a paramount. Google not only changed the search engine game, but changed the way we navigate the internet all together. Lucky for Google, they weren't around in 2000 and 2001 when the dotcom bubble burst and trillions of stock exchange dollars that had been invested in start-up companies were lost, a sum of about $3.5 trillion, almost crippling the prospect of successful e-commerce for small and large companies alike. Some companies survived the burst, namely eBay and Amazon, by placing the tools of functionality into the users hands and allowing them to do as they please. Customer satisfaction and good quality interaction became more important than flashy gimmicks or pretty homepages, and that holds true today. When we look back on the invention and early years of the internet, many things will be forgotten and misremembered, and who knows, the internet may be a completely different place than it is today.