This John Markoff New York Times article surveys the internet scene in 1993. It's a treat to read now, starting from its contrast of Delphia and Prodigy with this other thing:
In sharp contrast is the Internet, a collection of computer networks that does a little of what a national data highway would do and that already has hundreds of thousands of computer users.
Hundreds of thousands of users! What might they do?
A number of easy-to-use programs permit rapid searches and retrieval of software and data from the remote corners of the eletronic universe. Archie, for example, written by programmers at McGill University in Montreal, will almost instantly search more than a thousand computers and two million software packages for a particular program and display where it can be found. Archie is available through services like the Well.
Several hundred libraries in dozens of countries have already placed their catalogues on the Internet, and vast full-text data bases are likely to emerge in the future, which would allow users to receive books through the system...
(via BoingBoing)
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