Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine: AOL.com circa 1997 The World Wide Web is a powerfully fluid and dynamic network of information, accessed over the medium of the Internet, that was popularized in the mid-nineties. Revolutionizing the way people can learn, entertain, communicate, and share, the World Wide Web is responsible for the ease that we have grown so accustomed to within our lives. Tim Bernes-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, conceived the web as means of sharing information between scientists and government agencies as a web of documents, or hypertexts, that were linked to each other through hyperlinks. This was all done according to hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), using hypertext markup language (HTML), which could then display the web pages on standard software programs called web browsers (which came around by 1993). Some of the first web pages date back to 1991, and surprisingly, many of the early webpages are still popular over 20 years later. America Online, or www.aol.com, is an example of a webpage that became popular around the mid-nineties, especially in late 1996 when it stopped charging an hourly rate and instead charged its customers a flat monthly rate. When looking back on various webpages from the nineties through the Wayback Machine, a web capture from April 21, 1997 of America Online seems to mark the transition where information from the World Wide Web was finally becoming more easily accessible to the public. At first glance, America Online’s “home page” from 1997 seems color-less, text-heavy and lacking complex graphics. With only two images - both of the America Online logo - one is left to scroll through paragraphs of text down the middle of the webpage, with a few hyperlinks located in a column to the left. The background of the webpage is white, with black Times New Roman text – boasting that over 8 million people choose AOL - which is occasionally broken up with bolded headings. The hyperlinks are in white text, which turn blue once they