The decade the network arrived
At the start of the 1990s, most computer users worked with standalone machines or with small office networks. By the end, a large share of households in wealthy countries had at least heard of the internet, and many used email. The decade combined steady hardware improvement with the growth of a new kind of software, the web page.
From a research tool to the World Wide Web
The internet had existed for years as a network used by researchers and universities. What changed was ease of use. At CERN in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system for linked documents in 1989 and 1990, and the first web servers and a browser were running by the end of 1990. The World Wide Web was opened to wider use in 1991 and 1992. In 1993 the Mosaic browser, from the University of Illinois, brought images and a point-and-click style that attracted many new users. Netscape followed in 1994 and became a household name for a while, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer competed fiercely through the second half of the decade.
Many people got online through dial-up modems, which tied up the phone line and moved data slowly by later standards. Services such as AOL, CompuServe and local internet providers sold access. Early web pages were simple, and sites loaded slowly, but the novelty was large.
Email and online communication
Electronic mail was an older technology, but the 1990s made it widespread among ordinary users, first at universities and companies and then at home through free web-based accounts toward the end of the decade. Chat rooms, discussion forums and instant messaging also took off. Older dial-up bulletin board systems declined as the web grew.
Finding things on the web became a business of its own. Directories such as Yahoo organized links by subject, and automatic search engines including AltaVista tried to index pages. Google began as a research project at Stanford and was incorporated in 1998, using links between pages as a signal of importance.
Business and the dot-com boom
Online shopping and auction sites such as Amazon and eBay began in the mid-1990s. Investors rushed to fund internet start-ups, and stock prices of technology companies rose steeply in the later years of the decade. The boom ended in 2000 and 2001, when many companies failed, an episode usually called the dot-com bust. The period shows how quickly expectations can run ahead of what a technology delivers, although some of the firms from that time are still around.
The multimedia PC
Hardware changed to support sound, video and graphics. CD-ROM drives became common in home computers, and discs held encyclopedias, games and educational titles. Sound cards and faster graphics hardware turned PCs into entertainment machines. The Pentium processor, released in 1993, was heavily marketed, and by the end of the decade ordinary home computers were far more capable than the business machines of the early 1990s.
Microsoft released Windows 95 with a new design, including a Start button and taskbar, and it sold in very large numbers. A free operating system kernel called Linux, started by a student in Finland in 1991, grew through volunteer contributions and became important for servers. Apple went through a difficult period and then recovered later in the decade with new products.
Games and consoles
Three-dimensional graphics changed games. Doom in 1993 helped popularize first-person shooters and online multiplayer play over networks, and Sony’s PlayStation, launched in Japan in 1994, helped make 3D console games mainstream. Game consoles moved from cartridges toward optical discs.
Smaller and smarter devices
Handheld devices also began to catch on. Personal digital assistants such as the Palm Pilot, released in 1996, offered calendars and contacts that could be synchronized with a desktop PC. Mobile phones were growing quickly, but most were used for calls and simple text messages. Laptop computers became cheaper and more practical, although they remained a minority of sales.
In artificial intelligence research, a chess computer built by IBM, Deep Blue, defeated the world champion Garry Kasparov in a match in 1997. It drew public attention, though it was a specialized machine designed for one game.
The year 2000
As the decade closed, organizations spent considerable time and money checking whether software that stored years with two digits would fail at the turn of the century. The Y2K problem produced much anxiety, and the relatively smooth passage into 2000 is often credited both to real preparation and to the fact that some fears were overblown. Experts continue to disagree on the exact proportions.
Summary of the decade
The 1990s linked the computer to the network. A machine that had been a tool for tasks like writing and accounting became a way to read, communicate, buy and play. Problems that would define the next decade, such as spam, security and the question of who pays for online content, were already visible.