I have unearthed a few old articles typed during my adolescence, between 1996 and 1998. Unremarkable at the time, these pages now compose, three decades later, the chronicle of a vanished era.1
The word “blog” does not exist yet. Wikipedia remains to come. Google has not been born. AltaVista reigns over searches, while already struggling to embrace the nascent immensity of the web2. To meet someone, you had to agree in advance and prepare your route on paper maps. 🗺️
The web is taking off. The CSS specification has just emerged, HTML tables still serve for page layout. Cookies and advertising banners are making their appearance. Pages are adorned with music and videos, forcing browsers to arm themselves with plugins. Netscape Navigator sits on 86% of the territory, but Windows 95 now bundles Internet Explorer to quickly catch up. Facing this offensive, Netscape opensource its browser.
France falls behind. Outside universities, Internet access remains expensive and laborious. Minitel still reigns, offering phone directory, train tickets, remote shopping. This was not yet possible with the Internet: buying a CD online was a pipe dream. Encryption suffers from inappropriate regulation: the DES algorithm is capped at 40 bits and cracked in a few seconds.
These pages bear the trace of the web’s adolescence. Thirty years have passed. The same battles continue: data selling, advertising, monopolies.
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Most articles linked here are not translated from French to English. ↩︎
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I recently noticed that Google no longer fully indexes my blog. For example, it is no longer possible to find the article on lanĉo. I assume this is a consequence of the explosion of AI-generated content or a change in priorities for Google. ↩︎