Andy Baio has a YouTube channel collecting some amazing media-ephemera from the ’90s and this gem embedded above will teach you everything you need to know about the internet through complicated analogies like “The internet is an airport.” If viewing naive takes on the internet isn’t amazing enough, the public television graphics and strange out-of-time fashions of the PBS hosts provides plenty of entertainment.
Baio writes: (link: )
A while back, I started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny, they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.I digitized the VHS tapes using a VCR connected to a MiniDV camera’s pass-through feature to my Macbook Pro. After I started putting these online, a couple more were sent to me, which I’ve included in the collection. And then my VCR broke.
Explore Baio’s full playlist of retroactively cheesy round-ups here, including several BBC episodes of The Net and The Electronic Frontier circa 1993.
(Photo: The Internet Show)
