The Internet via Mosaic and the World Wide Web - 12 years on

A long time ago, back in 1994, I wrote a book about the Internet, which was published by Ziff Davis Press: The Internet via Mosaic and the World Wide Web. It was the first book published to cover the Web in detail, and sold moderately well. Not a best-seller, but it did OK.

Looking on my bookshelf just now, I thought it would be fun to start looking at what I wrote 12 years ago, to see what, if anything has changed. Remember this was in a world of Mosaic - the first graphical web browser. Netscape had yet to fully appear on the scene. Internet Explorer didn't exist, and Firefox and Opera hadn't even been thought of.

So, without further chit chat, let's start with chapter 1.

The first interesting point is the number of active hosts on the Internet. At the time of the book (well, early 1994), that number was 2.2 million. A large number you may think, but the numbers just kept growing...

1995 - 4.8 million

1996 - 9.4 million

1997 - 16.1 million

1998 - 29.6 million

1999 - 43.2 million

2000 - 72.3 million

2001 - 109.5 million

2002 - 147.3 million

2003 - 171.6 million

2004 - 233.1 million

2005 - 317.6 million

2006 - 394.9 million

(source: Internet Systems Consortium)

Wow. What an increase. Back then, although it was obvious that the Internet was going to get big, that kind of growth was unimaginable. The rest of chapter 1 is pretty much explaining how the Internet hangs together, IP addresses, domain names etc. which hasn't really changed.

What has changed is the reference to getting connected. This was pre-broadband, so the choices were dial-up or leased line. In this age of ADSL and cable modems, dial-up seems prehistoric.

An explanation of ARCHIE, GOPHER and WAIS plonk us firmly in the past. When did you last use one of those? The Web has smothered everything else.

That's all for chapter 1. When I get some more time I'll look into other chapters.