Plundering The NYT Archives

Now that TimesSelect is dead, the archives of the Times are available to anyone. Kottke went to town: reports of Custer's last stand, the Titanic, San Francisco earthquake, and this:

The first mention of the World Wide Web in the Times in February 1993. According to the article, the purpose of the web is "[to make] available physicists' research from many locations". Also notable are this John Markoff article on the internet being overwhelmed by heavy traffic and growth...in 1993, and a piece, also by Markoff, on the Mosaic web browser.

I loved this 1993 prediction:

"Free services like those on the Internet can't continue indefinitely," said Alexis Rosen, the president and founder of the Panix service. Because informal news about events on the network flows so quickly through electronic word of mouth, what Mr. Rosen called "flash crowds" are beginning to appear with increasing frequency to instantly clog computer systems.