Books – 404PageFound

Nowadays we have the Internet to help us with the Internet. In the early days, it wasn’t so easy. We instead had to turn to books. The interest in the Internet skyrocketed from 1993-1998, and seemingly every author wanted to jump on the “How-To Surf the Web” bandwagon. Search engines essentially did not exist, and web directories were a novel concept. Consumers turned to thousand-page print directories to navigate the web. As a result of both the ignorance of web users and young age of the Web, dozens of books related to the Internet and World Wide Web were published in this time period.

Typically, books focused on topics such as:

Using Telnet, Gopher, FTP, and newsgroups
Connecting via Mosaic, and then Netscape
Internet white and yellow pages
Directories by category (government, children, science, law, games)
Connecting schools to the Internet
Online business

However, many became somewhat obsolete upon publication due to the multitude of new sites appearing every day. Early directories (pre-1996) lacked a CD-ROM, so all sites would have been manually entered. Moreover, early niche sites had a tendency to disappear (as owners lost interest, switched hosts, or began a new project) and links easily went sour. Today, these books remain relics from the past but will always provide a historical insight into the excitement of the times. Additionally, a few early Internet VHS tapes can be occasionally found on eBay.

A list of dated Internet/WWW books from 1993-1997 that can be found on Amazon:

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