Last Monday, Google celebrated its 12th birthday. The search giant’s journey from a garage in Silicon Valley to a huge global success is without doubt an inspirational subject for a feature article, but we looked at what the internet was like before Larry and Sergey registered Google.com in 1997.

Dave Hartland has been working with the internet since the early 1990s. Currently the director of a staff development organisation JISC Netskills based at Newcastle University, Dave’s first job in IT was in 1991 as a user support officer for Mailbase, a national email-based internet service.

We asked Dave to talk about the early days of the internet and life before Google.

Buzzing early ’90s

In the beginning it was all a bit clunky and simple, but the buzz was getting bigger and bigger. The early 1990s saw new technologies constantly emerging and new features incorporated into Mailbase, Dave explains.

“For example, there was a service called Gopher”, he says. “It was very much like the web but it looked more like just lists that were linked to files. It was developed by the University of Minnesota which is where the name comes from – Minnesota was known as the gopher state.”

“At the same time there was something called Archie, which I think came from the word archive. Archie was using FTP (file transfer protocol) and that was really the first search engine.

“Every month an Archie server interrogated FTP services and would find all files it could and index them.

“There was also a couple of things that came along that were a bit more like the web. For example, a thing called Hyper-G which was developed by the Graz University in Switzerland. It was already much more sophisticated with hypertext, hotspots and images.”

“This thing called world wide web”

Dave’s colleague Jill Foster was deeply involved in the Internet Society which was trying to promote the development of the internet across the world in the early 90s. Also a member was a guy called Tim Berners-Lee who had “this thing called the world wide web” which he was trying to get people interested in.

“Tim came along to present to the group on his idea which, I have to say, people initially didn’t really get. Particularly because in those days browsers were not like they are now so it was quite hard to try to understand what he was trying to do.”

This was until the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications in the US invented Mosaic – the first graphical browser.

“When Mosaic came out that’s when it really took off. It was the first browser as we recognise it and it really leapfrogged everything.”

According to Dave, the ace in world wide web’s sleeve was that it was fully open source.

“The other efforts were all reasonably successful and very much competitors to the web in the early 90s but the licensing made it more difficult for them to take on. That was never an issue for the web.”

27 September 1997

Dave remembers the birth of Google well.

“We used to run a workshop that was featuring emerging technologies and techniques in finding information”, he explains. “I can remember featuring Google as this new thing that a couple of graduates from Stanford had developed.”

When it first came out, no one was really sure if it could work.

“It seemed so extraordinary that any one search engine could index such a vast percentage of the internet – even though the internet was much smaller then – and deliver the results so fast.

“We were absolutely amazed and I think that’s sort of been lost now, people take for granted what an amazing thing Google does.

“Now obviously, like with any other big and powerful company, there are a lot of dangers and they don’t get everything right by any means, but one thing I really like about them is that they try new things all the time, try to really push things forward.”

And Vint Cerf is a cool guy

Dave was there also when Vint Cerf, now Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist and often referred to as the “father of the internet”, came to talk at workshops that were part of the Internet Society’s annual conferences.

So what was he like?

“A really nice guy. Looks a little bit like Doc Holliday, like an American cowboy. He always wore a three-piece-suit with a watch chain. Very laconic and slow-spoken but very impressive and really holds your attention. It’s a bit of an old fashioned word but I guess he comes across as being very wise.”

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