Do you know what the first item bought off Amazon was? Or the first MP3? Do you know what the first webcam showed? All of these artifacts of internet history are brilliantly captured in a new interactive museum of the internet.
The Internet Artifacts museum is the wonderful creation of coder Neal Agarwal. It skims through internet history in chronological order with a series of exhibits that do more than you might first think.
Skip forward to 1999, for example, and you’ll find the exhibit celebrating the arrival of the notorious Napster, the MP3 sharing service that had record label executives tearing their hair out. The exhibit includes a list of late 1990s songs that you might have downloaded at the time Napter launched. And if you click on one of the track titles, you can download the song in question. Although you might be in for a pleasant surprise when you try to play the track on your computer.
The First Webcam
Other key moments of internet history include the advent of the first webcam in 1993. This was placed in the Computer Lab at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and it had a very specific and important purpose: to keep an eye on the amount of coffee in the lab’s pot, letting researchers see if there was enough for them to pour themselves a mug without having to leave their desks.
The watched coffee pot eventually became something of an internet sensation, with millions of people viewing the webcam, despite the fact its grainy footage was only delivered at a rate of three frames per second.
The First MP3
Another choice exhibit in the Internet Artifacts museum is what’s claimed to be the first ever MP3 from as far back as 1987. This was an a capella version of Tom’s Diner, sung by Suzanne Vega.
The museum lets you click and hear the isolated vocal performance, which was used as a test to see whether the data compression distorted the vocals, as it did with earlier versions of the now universal music format.
Fancy a trip down gaming’s memory lane? The museum include’s an early example of a Flash game written by my former IT journalist colleague David McCandless. The Helicopter Game, released in 2002, is a horribly addictive side-scrolling game similar to the later Flappy Bird, where you have to dodge obstacles by flying the helicopter up and down by pressing and releasing the mouse button.
The game is available to play at the Internet Artifacts museum—thankfully without the need to download and install the now defunct Flash plugin.
Here Ends Internet History
The museum goes only as far as 2007, which is far enough to take in the emergence of the social media industry, with artifacts including the first ever tweet and an early homepage for “The Facebook”, Mark Zuckerberg’s first stab at the now omnipotent network.
For anyone who’s witnessed the evolution of the internet—or even for those who can’t remember a time before it—the Internet Artifacts museum is a delightful way to waste half an hour.
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