Vanity Fair has published a long oral history of the Internet entitled How the Web was Won, and based on interviews with a variety of notable folks. Here’s links to the single page versions of the article and a photo portfolio. If I had been interviewed for the article, my response would have looked a lot like this:
My first direct connection to the Internet was through my faculty office computer at Marquette University in 1993. I was a visiting assistant professor on a one-year contract, teaching business ethics and management courses.
The main Internet service that I remember using at Marquette was Gopher, a text-based system that used menus instead of hyperlinks. In some ways, it resembled CompuServe, which I had used since 1981. CompuServe was a well-organized walled garden that had a nice variety of content, while Gopher was a rag-tag distributed network of university computers and a few commercial servers.
I became familiar with BITNET while I was at the University of Georgia. Both systems offered portals to Internet services. The first items I ever purchased through e-commerce were a Shriekback CD on CompuServe in 1987, and a Dead Runners Society t-shirt from a listserv in 1990.
In early 1994, the university installed a demo workstation that ran Mosaic. That was the first time i accessed the World Wide Web on a graphical browser. Later that year, I built my first web page, and I’ve had a presence on the web ever since.
