The Internet ... on Videotapes!

Andy Baio of Waxy is digitizing his collection of VHS tapes about the Internet from the early to mid-1990s.

The earliest snapshots in the Wayback Machine are from the mid 90s, so Andy said that "this represents pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else."

This one is from a two-tape collection called "Internet Power!" from 1995:

"You’ll need a device to access the online world. That device is a Computer, with at least 386 power and 8 megabytes of RAM and has a modem installed that has 14.4 or greater speed or ‘baud rate.’ And of course, access to a phone line. If you have a slower modem, you will not be able to enjoy the growing multimedia aspects of the Internet, such as graphics, sound, and video."

The tape even covered search engines:

"To get started, we have to sift through the vast amounts of information on the Internet and find what we need. The best way to do this is by using one of the many Search Engines available. These sites gather the information that is out there and categorize it so we can narrow our search. One popular site to do this is called Yahoo!"

The list of search engines on the slide is a great flashback. "Web Crawler, Lycos, Einet, WWW Worm, Yahoo, Info Seek, Savvy Search… and More"

"Normally, these sites would take a few seconds to load to your computer, but in the interest of time, we’re cutting to them through editing for the purposes of this video."

Later, they cover a long-lost site called "The Weatherman," where you email your trip profile and a nice guy named George Gatto emails you a weather forecast by hand. I can’t imagine that’d scale very well.

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