I’m listening to the director’s commentary for Sleepless in Seattle, and Nora Ephron (the director) commented on the computer technology they used when Annie does the search for Sam. She says, “Looking at it now, it’s almost comical. In those days I don’t even think there was a Yahoo or anything…”
Well, that film came out in 1993, and in 1993 there most certainly was a Yahoo. It was a manually edited directory of site links and it was in the personal homepage site of some guy at Stanford University. In those days, pretty much everyone linked to Yahoo (which is an acronym that means “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”).
This was before Google (that appeared in around 1998, as I recall, but it may have been 1997; I was using Alta Vista back then, so I didn’t pay much attention, and by the way, I had one of those “Top 5% of the Web” sites, uhm, two or three of them, actually, and a Magellan Four Star Site and a couple other oh-so-prestigious “awards” from various search engines, so that says something right there, although I’m not sure what).
Ah, yeah, back in those days we were happy to have a 14.4Kbaud connection (or, if you were REALLY spiffy and slick, a 28.8Kbaud connection!) and Netscape 1.1 was the cool browser to have and you could get interviewed for the local newspaper merely by virtue of having a personal homepage (I know this because I was and I did). You kids today with your fancy PHP websites and your Web Two Point Oh and your broadband connections and your easy-to-use search engines, bah!
You don’t just don’t know how good you have it…
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