Vintage bookmarks

The beginning of the 90s was quite a different digital world. The World Wide Web was at its infancy, and a lot of information was still provided through terminal-emulation services such as Gopher, Archie, Veronica, and WAIS. If you had Internet access at your University, you could consider yourself very lucky — otherwise, for the rest of the people, the alternative was accessing the Internet via a painfully slow dial-up connection through a 14.4k modem.

Even when the Web started to become mainstream the amount of information you could find on it was very limited. Google didn't exist yet; there were search engines but their content was manually entered and organized. To help organize a web of information, it was common for people owning a homepage to have a special "Bookmarks" page listing the interesting and worthwhile URLs.

I recently found on a old diary a list of bookmarks I noted, circa 1994. Today, for the 25 years of the World Wide Web, I include some of them here. (Of course, most links are dead by now.)

Documentation on the Mosaic browser
GeoCities - the first and most known provider for personal webpages, it offered a whopping 512 Kbytes of space for free
The Internet Oracle
The Jargon File
Delos Cyberzine - hosted on MC-link, one of the first Italian BBS
Mensa Italia
VideoOnLine - one of the first Italian ISPs, well-known for its portal providing a lot of free software
Internet Movie DataBase - UK mirror of the IMDB
Amnesty International - it provided material through a FTP server at that time
Yahoo - the leading search engine