SoylentNews

owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

Thirty years ago, a breakthrough technology was poised to transform how people stayed informed, entertained themselves, and maybe even shopped. I’m not talking about the World Wide Web. True, it was already getting good buzz among early adopter types. But even three years after going online, Tim Berners-Lee’s creation was “still relatively slow and crude” and “limited to perhaps two million Internet users who have the proper software to gain access to it,” wrote The New York Times’ Peter H. Lewis in November 1994.

At the time, it was the CD-ROM that had captured the imagination of consumers and the entire publishing industry. The high-capacity optical discs enabled mass distribution of multimedia for the first time, giving software developers the ability to create new kinds of experiences. Some of the largest companies in America saw them as media’s next frontier, as did throngs of startups. In terms of pure mindshare, 1994 might have been the year of Peak CD, with 17.5 million CD-ROM drives and $590 million in discs sold, according to research firms Dataquest and Link Resources.

Note, the following bookmarklet [wikipedia.org] will remove the thin lightweight font style from the page, making the overall text much easier to read:

javascript:(function(){var all=document.getElementsByTagName("*");for (var i=0,max=all.length;i<max;i++){all[i].style.fontWeight='400';};void(0);})();

Original Submission