A Piece of Internet History the Internet Almost Forgot

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. The Atlantic launched its website in November 1995, 138 years after it first went into print. The magazine began in response to one information revolution; the website appeared at the dawn of another. Now, 30 years on from the launch, you can buy a copy of the first printed edition of the magazine on eBay, but you can’t find much of the original website. The internet, notable for remembering just about everything, seems to have forgotten that particular piece of its own history. In some ways, it’s fitting that so few traces are left. The totality of the internet—as both a gathering of information and a way of life—has made imagining the phases of its history almost impossible. Even those who witnessed its beginning can barely remember. We may recall what the dial-up modem’s weird dirge sounded like, but it’s hard to quite recapture what happened after it stopped. The early evidence that does survive—the wild optimism, the comically bad predictions, the Flash art—are as easily mocked as they are forgotten. But the scattered remnants of the Atlantic Unbound, as the magazine’s early digital forays were called, point to an idealism that was genuine in its moment: a time when people believed that online space could foster serious reading and intellectual exchange. In December 1995, that year was hailed by Newsweek as “the Year of the Internet,” marking the decisive turning point in online life. It was the year people began to move out of the closed ecosystems of services like AOL, where you logged in and didn’t venture beyond its mail services, chat rooms, and internal content. You could reach the wider internet, but doing so was clunky and limited. And few had tried: Only about 14 percent of Americans had ever been online, and a little more than 30 percent of households owned a computer at all. With the introduction of the Netscape browser in late 1994, ordinary people could venture into the wilderness of the open web. No one quite knew how to talk about what the internet was, mixing metaphors about the information superhighway on which you surfed. Into this moment stepped The Atlantic, one of the country’s oldest magazines. When its site went live, The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution included a notice in their printed “On the Internet” page of its Sunday edition, which included a log of “some of the newest sites on the World Wide Web”: All Things Political, the American Kennel Club, George, Car and Driver, and “the venerable Atlantic Monthly—established in 1857.” A media columnist at Toronto’s Globe and Mail questioned whether a magazine known to be “sober and intellectually challenging” was really the best fit. Noting that three of the hefty features from that month’s print magazine weighed in “at 21,919 words” total, he wondered if The Atlantic and online made the best pairing. “Surely a length more suited to reading in a bathtub,” he said, “than on a screen while the Internet meter is running.” The actual process of taking The Atlantic online may feel as quaint as the notion of “the Internet meter.” As then–editorial director for new media, Scott Stossel—now the national editor of The Atlantic—told me, building a website involved learning the relevant code by way of the book HTML for Dummies. Because the graphics were basic and the bells and whistles were few, the feat of making a webpage was well within the reach of what the special-projects editor, Wen Stephenson (now a correspondent at The Nation), described to me as “a bunch of humanities geeks and one tech guy.” Mostly, the work involved moving and formatting large amounts of text from the magazine onto the web—something that was easy enough to do working from electronic files but harder when it came to posting treasures from the magazine’s archive. Because text-recognition software couldn’t make sense of the irregularities of 19th-century typefaces, Stossel told me the editors looked into hiring hand-typists—perhaps the Trappist monks at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia—to transcribe portions of the archive. In the absence of more careful monastic textual-preservation practices, we are left with just one small trace of that original site to read. What survives shows how The Atlantic imagined the web—not just as a novelty but as an extension of its literary and intellectual commitments. In April 1995, the magazine hosted a digital discussion on AOL with the poet Robert Pinsky, about his 1994 translation of Dante’s Inferno. On the new website, any visitor could find selections of Pinsky’s text, including audio files of him reading aloud. They could compare Pinsky’s readings with a selection from the Atlantic co-founder Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s own 1867 translation, and navigate to Longfellow’s sonnets on translating Dante, which he’d published in the magazine in the 1860s. If they wanted...

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