1990s: Peace, Prosperity and the Internet | HISTORY (2024)

FAQs

How did the Internet impact the 90s? ›

Because the Internet allowed people to always be connected, it changed the way they worked. Many Americans could now work at home and easily tap into the files they needed at their workplace. Laptop computers allowed them to take their work on the road.

In 1991, the World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (pictured at left) as a way for people to share information. The hyper-text format available through his Web made the internet much easier to use because all documents could be seen easily on-screen without downloading.

The 90s gave us the very first websites on the world wide web, launching us into a whole new age of the internet. In the span of a decade, web pages went from little more than glorified Word documents to boisterous sites full of vibrant colors, cheesy cursors, and excessive animation.

Things started to resemble today's world in the 1990s: People were using cell phones and had computers in their homes. People were exposed to sleek new digital products that foreshadowed many of the gadgets we use today. In 1996, the world said goodbye to VHS and adopted a new technology for watching videos -- the DVD.

The dotcom bubble, also known as the Internet bubble, grew out of a combination of the presence of speculative or fad-based investing, the abundance of venture capital funding for startups, and the failure of dotcoms to turn a profit.

During the mid-1990s, the Netscape browser — named 'Navigator' — ruled the web. Many Internet Service Providers and computer magazines gave away disk-versions of Netscape. Remember that — unlike today — you had to acquire a browser via a disk, as they were too large to download from the web itself.

These included portable cassette players (most notably Sony's "Walkman"), portable CD players (the also popular Sony's "Discman"), Minidisc players and MP3 players. Your device of choice likely depended on the size of your wallet or your parent's bank account but they were all awesome in their own ways.

Yes, the internet revolution increased productivity, but not as much as in other periods.

In the mid- and late 1990s, people started to turn to the internet to get their news. Newspaper readership began to decline, and viewership of the traditional nightly news broadcasts continued to diminish.

How did the internet make the world smaller in the 1990s? ›

People felt that world became a little smaller in the 1990s because of the rise of the internet. People with shared interests could interact through the internet regardless of geographic location. Connections were made through blogs and other websites.

Internet access via dial-up modems slowly gained traction during the 1990s. By 2000, 50 percent of households had dial-up access and the No. 1 website was AOL. Entertainment options shifted in the 1990s, too, with DVDs replacing video and CD players replacing tapes.