A decade of Internet

This month marks the 10th Anniversary of the launch of Andalucia.com the most visited and longest established website about Spain. 350,000 people view 1 million pages on it each month because surfing the internet is now part of modern life. 10 years ago it was very different, let`s look back to where we were on the Internet in April 1996.

Before going on line, reference yourself in the POP music world. Songs that were big in April 1996 were "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette, "Fastlove" by George Michael and "Firestarter" by The Prodigy also "Oh Ah Just a little bit" by Gina G was the UK's Annoying Song for the Eurovision Song Contest.

1996 was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty by the UN. In the news that month were Martin Bryant kills 35 people as part of the Port Arthur Massacre, at the Port Arthur tourist site, Tasmania, Australia. Christopher Robin Milne, English author of Winnie the Poo books died. Sir Christopher Bland succeeded Marmaduke Hussey as BBC chairman and was soon in controversy for extending the Director General John Birt's contract by a further five years. Later to become Lord Birt he took up a directorship with Paypal in Febuary 2004. If you were looking for news; the Internet was not the place to look. Even the BBC News Online only started in November 1997.

Here in southern Spain very few people had internet connections let alone web pages. Mercury Internet were the only company offering local access in Marbella, Vnet and Activanet had nodes in Málaga city. Telefonica introduced InfoVia that year which was a radical step by any standards to offer local call rate internet access. Before this we were calling Madrid and paying a surcharge of 17pts a minute to get to Compuserve.

At least Windows 1995 was beginning to gain popularity, it included the TCP/IP and PPP software necessary to connect to the internet. A Windows 3.11 Internet Configuration could take anything up to two hours.

Lookout magazine had recently run an article by Janet Mendal on the since well run concept about foreigners who live in Spain and work with the aid of the internet. The front cover featured an man on a beach with a laptop; still science fiction. The article featured only four people including Lauwrence Boheme a translator in Montefrio Granada, now www.donlorenzo.com a man with Internet but no mains electricity and American Patricia Broom from Fuengirola the only Real Estate agent on the coast with an internet connection. Not forgetting my wife, Michelle who was busy photographing, scanning and sending images down the telephone line to all round the world.

In 1996 we tried to follow the fortunes of two British eccentric Amateur rally drivers in an old yellow Land Rover who decided to try their luck in the gruelling Paris - Dakar rally. That year it began on the Gran Via in Granada at 6am on New Years day much to the delight of the revellers. Without race results published on the net and with Eurosport only featuring the leaders the only way to find out how their were doing was to phone the organisers in Paris. We are now so accustomed to access to minority interest sport results.

Microsoft Internet Explorer had just been launched in Beta form and the 'browser wars' were about to begin. Those who surfed the web were fast migrating from the Spry Mosaic Browser to Netscape the exciting young company who raised historical sums at their IPO some months before. Version 2 with email and a white not neutral grey page background had just been released and it included capability for Framesets. That was cool! A generation of web page designers have since followed this folly to the detriment of their clients' search engine rankings.

Speaking to potential business clients about the having a website to market a business our sales handouts included explanations of the benefits of an internet connection and why email is so much more efficient than a fax transmission. Clients would often ask "Who owns the internet?" something they never ask today even though it is just as relevant and interesting a question. Now we just take it for granted.

I have even found a web site which I created in 1996 to be still on and unchanged except for the prices in ten years. Take a look at La Almuña guesthouse at http://www.andalucia.com/gaucin/almuna

There were 150 thousand web servers then and 80 million now and increasing at about 3 million a month. There were perhaps 300 thousand domains registered worldwide then and today there are over 100 million. Many countries still did not have their own domain registries. The domain name tv.com sold to CNET for US$15,000.

Internet phones caught the attention of US telecommunication companies who asked the US Congress to ban the technology. Obviously they did not, but even today Internet phones are just starting to take off.

In February, 1996 Steve Jobs of Apple made a two year prediction. "We have a two-year window. If the Web doesn't reach ubiquity in the next two years, Microsoft will own it. And that will be the end of it." Luckily it wasn't the end of anything and we are still just at the beginning. .