Surfin on the Net
Christopher McKenna · ACM SIGICE bulletin/SIGICE bulletin · 1995
Not too long ago the internet was an imagery land of ftp sites and gopher servers scattered across the world with no convenient pathway to where anything was. You heard about an ftp or gopher server from a friend or stumbled upon it by accident. Maybe you were impressed to get a piece of mail from a friend in another state or country in seconds after he/she sent it. Maybe you even followed a world wide forum on your favorite topic or application. In this vast land of information, however, nothing was there to tie these services together. Just like everything else in the world, the internet got better and gained another TCP/IP client server tool, the World Wide Web (WWW). A spider net of documents containing images, sounds, binaries, and even movie clips. The internet finally had some backbone and shape to it. It was like a new way of living had emerged over night, I do mean overnight.