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 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