Nah, the global internet was at least a decade old, and by 2003 the web had long been established as the "face" of the internet. Heck, we were already a few years behind the infamous dot-com bubble.
Glad to see that noted as I remember using the Gopher protocol on a VAX before 1990. I could not do much but explore and send email...maybe get a file, although it was strictly science and academia, at least as far as I knew about. In fact I remember the day that that worm hit that somebody's son designed. Little did I know what was ahead, I just thought..this is kind of interesting....oh well, back to work, I will play around with it some more later (I had that part right .
DARPANET was an early precursor to the full blown Internet. I was using it in the late 60s, programming in LISP on a computer in California, thousands of miles from Boston, MA. I had discovered a DARPANET-connected terminal while snooping around MIT while I was still in High School... DARPANET supported Gopher, FTP and other protocols which were used in the early Internet. So an incarnation of the Internet was born in the 1960s
In the grand scheme of things, a million years is a blink of an eye. But in the petri dish that is the Internet, 10 years is a couple of epochs.
These are two interesting maps....if I am to believe what I read about the internet on the internet. from: https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001016.htm from: https://twitter.com/workergnome/status/807704855276122114/photo/1
I vividly remember seeing AOL cd's everywhere around the time I graduated in 93 around here. Dial up internet hit some areas here before touch tone phone service did. Forty seconds of rotary dialing followed by the modem sounds anyone from the time would recognize, and then 20 - 30 seconds later "You've got mail"
My youngest daughter worked in the mailroom at U of Georgia as a student in the 90s. They had so many AOL CDs coming in and being trashed they started stapling them to the walls of the mailroom as decorations. The walls were completely covered in them. Yeah I remember Gopher and FTP, also rippers/grabbers to download/upload Usenet msgs and files in bulk to save on dialup and long-distance charges. The Comptroller at work asked me once why I was making so many long-distance calls.
Looking at the first map, though, that's not really the Internet per se. There is no IMP showing like on the second one. That' some academic network in California that must have been connected to the net when the IMP showed up. If you've not read RFC1000, it's a great thing to know about.
