In 1896, one of the first Lumière brothers films, “L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat”, was shown to audiences. The minute-long one-shot showed footage of a train arriving at La Ciotat station, and was shot at an angle which made it appear as if the train was about to smash into the left-front side of the theatre. Reports of early screenings suggest that many members of the audience, what with the entire concept of seeing moving pictures of previously recorded events being previously unimaginable, screamed in panic and ran to the back of the room, fearing that the somehow silent and monochrome train would smush their 19th century selves into person pâté.
Whip-pan to 98 years on, and The Web was the Next Big Thing. While not too many people actually had home access to it themselves, it seemed everyone at least knew of it (“The girls of the internet… rowr, I’d like to go on-line with them!” – H. Simpson). Indeed, many of them might have paid good money to spend an hour at an Internet Cafe much like the one we visited in Wrexham around that time, where they could have spent upwards of ten minutes waiting for a heavily compressed GIF of a cartoon steam train to load. What with the entire concept of being ‘jacked in’ to the InfoMotorway having been unimaginable to the undeveloped 1994 brains of these early adopters, many assumed the postage stamp-sized graphic was somehow real, meaning many screamed in panic and ran to the back of the room, and were subsequently banned from the cafe meaning they had to go to the one in Chester instead. It was an exciting time
Join us now as we take a look at issue one of .net magazine, the first (we think) publication dedicated to all things on-line to hit Britain’s newsagents, from December 1994, back when it was still quicker to read things from a magazine than on the web, and the word ‘online’ still had a hyphen in it. At this point, the internet was how popular?
16.5 million people. That’s not in the UK. That’s worldwide. Jeepers, eh?
