These screenshots from 25 years ago show how much the internet has changed

Web Design Museum

A 1996 Morgan Stanley analyst report predicted the prevalence of the Internet.
He said that a person with intermediate web knowledge is anyone who simply knows their own email address.
From clip art to Comic Sans, screenshots show just how different the internet is 25 years later.
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Morgan Stanley technology analysts Mary Meeker and Chris DePuy knew the world was on the cusp of something big in 1996. They wrote a 323-page report expressing their high hopes for the internet, saying it could to be “one of the hottest new markets to develop.” in years. “

A look back at the report now shows just how far the internet has come in 25 years.

For starters, the report shows how rare some now common internet activity was in the past. Among the estimated 150 million PC users worldwide, the authors estimated that 23% had used email for work, 6% had used the web, and 5% had used an online service.

â€œWe believe that email, online / web access can be ubiquitous for PC users within a decade,â€ the authors wrote. â€œAt a minimum, email should become ubiquitous. The same is true for Internet / Web access: Email is the Internet’s ‘killer application’ today, and browsing information services is the “killer app” of tomorrow. “

Another marker of the web’s progress has come from the report authors’ guide aimed at audiences of different levels of Internet literacy.

Meeker and DePuy defined a new reader of the report as someone who “had never heard of Motley Fool or CNET or Yahoo”. An intermediate audience was anyone who “knows [their] own e-mail address. “

Take a peek into the internet of yesteryear with these screenshots of websites from 25 years ago.

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