A trip back in time with MacUser

Reader John sent us a fascinating little trip back in time (thanks!) he took on his blog: he found a 1996 copy of MacUser about all of the amazing applications available on the Internet, and decided go look at what had become of them. Sadly, most of them have gone missing, but the old names sound familiar: CU-SeeMe for messaging, Lycos for search, and Happy Puppy for gaming. It's almost hard to believe there was a time before Skype, Google, and Steam, but 1996 was it.

Even Apple has moved on -- their "/documents/product-support" page, something you'd think would have survived all this time, is gone. It's amazing the turnover the Internet's gone through in just 10 years. It's hard to believe that in 2029, something like Google.com will be retaken by a domain squatter as everyone's moved on to the next big thing.

But then again, things are different these days -- Google has obviously successfully figured out how to monetize their free service, and most of the original web companies went down because they could pull that off. But you never know -- a site you visit all the time might be completely changed or gone ten years from now.
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