(part 2)

For a long time, personal web pages were sort of the equivalent of what BBSs used to offer, but very decentralized. IRC took over for BBS Chat, ftp sites took over for local BBS file offerings and email took over for BBS mail and FidoNet -- Usenet was suddenly introduced to an entire generation of users. Except instead of whoever was the local user community of your local BBS it was some slice of technically minded people all over the planet. Most ISPs gave you a few MB to put up your own page and a few pointers on basic HTML, how to ftp, and off you went!

There really weren't any "corporate" sites or big centralized sites at the time. So people came up with all kinds of ways to try to connect. The earliest was just people putting up links to favorite sites on their personal pages. Soon larger indexes of sites were started (and suddenly Yahoo! appeared). The other was to connect similarly themed personal sites via a "web ring".

It still wasn't entirely obvious that the WWW would be "it" though. Many many services were started pushing their own protocol and systems to fill major technical gaps that existed at the time. Streaming video for example was pushed very heavily by RealPlayer. There was a number of experiments for "push" news clients for example.

Oddly, I don't really remember any credible attempts at another technology that was more or less like the WWW but with unique spins or tech approaches. It seems that the core approach was so good that everybody just tried to grab it and bastardize it to their own ways early on.

Many many small and local ISPs were started to service the growing dial-up business and the competition was awesome. I ended up work for an ISP from '96 to maybe '99. It wasn't long before unlimited dial-up became a thing. By the late 90s you could even get "free" dial-up if you used special dial-up software that filled a portion of your screen with ads. At some point I think I got a second phone line and just dialed-in 100% of the time. Always on internet was...amazing. Suddenly download managers started appearing to handle broken connections and redials and to help manage bandwidth over then 28.8kbps connections (kilo BITS per second).

There was a huge industry change up near the end of the 90s with the advent of 56k modems. Suddenly POTs phone lines had to be of very high quality, higher than most people had. It was very common to buy a brand new 56k modem and never get the maximum of something like 53kbps (it wasn't really possible to ever get 56kbps connections for various reasons. Most people would get 40k or so, but of course it was always the mom & pop ISPs fault for not getting the giant telecom to have clean lines :/

The desire for more speed, and the low quality of service most small ISPs could offer over 56k meant very rapid consolidation and investment in more expensive connection technologies like ISDN. When ADSL was finally announced, it was clear that the industry was going to move to a model with the phone company being the ISP and inside of a year or two almost every ISP who couldn't got out of the business.

During all this, AOL started offering more and more internet services, but resisted just becoming an ISP. This resulted in years of eternal septembers on various message boards and other services as millions of AOL users, newly introduced to some part of the internet for the first time ever engaged in typical eternal september behaviors. Among the more technically inclined users, an @aol.com email address wasn't even worth responding to.

At some point, maybe in the mind to late 90s, there was a concerted effort by a few pioneers to try to do business on the WWW. The technology wasn't really there for a while, and many of the efforts were weirdly skeuomorphic "online malls" and such. Very clumsy, but the technology was clumsy and web pages couldn't really be all the sophisticated. Amazon stuck it through, first as a bookstore and then they started to add more and more things. Another retailer, ThinkGeek was started in the late 90s and is still around. Most of the rest are long dead. It's interesting that both of those early "e-commerce" companies is now experimenting with brick-and-mortar stores.

It's worth it for somebody interested to lookup old videos and screenshots (and web captures) of the just pre-internet to early internet interfaces and tools. There's at least one effort I know of that's trying to revive the Prodigy Vector Art graphics as well as a couple of the smaller graphical BBS artworks.