Happy tenth anniversary to Netsurfer Digest! In its inaugural issue a decade ago, a goodly number of the services that it described weren't even available under HTTP. (One of the reasons that the browser Mosaic was so useful was that it could navigate gopher and FTP protocols.) Sunsite, the Sun-powered digital archive hosted at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, gets a mention. The section dedicated to proprietary online services is a necrology of failed and absorbed competitors to America Online: Compuserve takes pride of place, followed by Prodigy and a new service named Savannah (?!). Some things haven't changed much in ten years: an article describes newsgroup spamming (still in neologistic quotation marks), and another entry announces Virgina Shea's book about netiquette.

posted: 7:45:04 AM