The internet in 1991
The web existed as a single site at CERN describing what the web was, and almost nobody outside particle physics had heard of it. What people meant by "online" in 1991 was a bulletin board system, a university Usenet feed, or a commercial service like CompuServe or Prodigy, none of which connected to each other in any meaningful way. Connecting meant dialling a phone number and occupying the household line, and long-distance charges made the geography of which BBS you called a financial decision. A gigabyte of storage cost about the price of a used car.
The numbers
- Websites
- 1 hostnames responding to HTTP
- Typical connection
- 9.6 kbps — A 9,600 bps dial-up modem, if you were well equipped. Many people still had 2,400.
- A gigabyte of storage cost
- $9,000, in 1991 dollars
How long things took to download
| What | At 9.6 kbps |
|---|---|
| A 3 MB song | 43 minutes |
| A 5 MB photo | 1 hours 11 minutes |
| A 700 MB CD image | 6.9 days |
| A 4 GB film | 40 days |
| A 50 GB game | 506 days |
What arrived in 1991
- The World Wide Web, made publicly available in August
- Linux 0.01
- The first webcam, pointed at a coffee pot in Cambridge
The thing people misremember
Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the internet. The internet — the network and its protocols — dates to the 1970s and 1980s. He invented the web, which is one thing that runs on it, and the distinction is the difference between a road and a shop.
Against the years around it
| Year | Hostnames | Typical speed | $/GB of storage | A 4 GB film took |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1991 | 1 | 9.6 kbps | $9,000 | 40 days |
| 1993 | 130 | 14.4 kbps | $4,000 | 27 days |
Between 1991 and 2020 the typical connection went from 9.6 kbps to 100 Mbps, a factor of 10,417, and a gigabyte of storage fell from $9,000 to $0.020 — a factor of 450,000. The 4 GB film that took 40 days takes 6 minutes.
Common questions
- What was the internet like in 1991?
- The web goes public, and there is exactly one website. A typical home connection was 9.6 kbps, there were about 1 hostnames responding on the web, and a gigabyte of storage cost $9,000.
- How long did it take to download a film in 1991?
- A 4 GB film at 9.6 kbps would have taken about 40 days, assuming the connection held its rated speed the whole way, which it would not have.
- How many websites were there in 1991?
- About 1 hostnames responded to HTTP. That counts hostnames rather than distinct sites, which is why the figure occasionally falls between years without the web shrinking.
- What do people get wrong about 1991?
- Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the internet. The internet — the network and its protocols — dates to the 1970s and 1980s. He invented the web, which is one thing that runs on it, and the distinction is the difference between a road and a shop.
Related pages
- The internet in 1993 Mosaic puts pictures on the same page as text, and the web stops being a document store.
- Every year side by side Speed, storage cost and site count in one table
- Convert data units Bits, bytes, and why a megabit is not a megabyte
Sources
- Web Server Survey — Netcraft
- ICT Facts and Figures / World Telecommunication Indicators — International Telecommunication Union
- Historical cost of computer memory and storage — Compiled from contemporaneous retail advertising and manufacturer price lists