Internet and Web Application Security, 3rd Edition

The Early Internet

Before the arrival of the World Wide Web in 1991, the internet was not at all what you would call “user friendly.” There were very few internet service providers (ISPs), and the web had yet to gain an audience. In the early 1990s, connecting to content on the internetwork meant that a user had to subscribe to services like America OnLine (AOL), Byte Information Exchange (BIX), CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, or one or more bulletin-board services (BBS).

User interfaces were text-based and generally in the form of a menu of the functions available on a particular server, like the one shown in Figure 1-7. There was no hypertext. You connected to a server directly using a modulator/demodulator (modem), commonly through an acoustic ...