Mayowa of My Pleasure, Miss! sent an interesting email in reply to the MacUser May ’96 retrospective. I probably should have noted in the original piece, as Mayowa reminded me, that you can use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to resurrect many of the dead links. That includes treasures like Mark Kantrowitz’s Travel Periodicals, which turns out to be just as boring as you expected.

Another nice tidbit in Mayowa’s email was a link to this 1996 MSN “Welcome to the Internet” tutorial. My favorite part is the third page, “The Big Picture: Why Should I Care?” Yeah! Why should I care about this dumb Internet thing? Leave me alone, computer people! Family Matters is on!

But wait, says MSN, the Internet is actually a magical place. Imagine the possibilities:

Because it is very easy to publish on the web, many individuals have set up personal “home pages,” pages about themselves and their interests, pictures of themselves, and more. Some even have pointers to what they are wearing in the office that day or their pet.

Well, why didn’t you say so? Sign me up!¹

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1. Note: While this imagined exchange is a facetious joke, I realized, after reading it over, that it’s also a fairly accurate account of the Internet’s development over the last decade. ↑