Rare Canadian Artifacts from the Early Web
Canadians were early adopters of the Internet, a fact that is overshadowed because our neighbours to the south were even more avid. In 1995, a year before the Internet Archive started, as many as 3.5 million Canadians used the Internet, a population about the size of Toronto and greater than the population of British Columbia at the time. This number was enough to be ranked 4th in the world, after the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Today, countries like China, India, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria have increased their use of the Internet, creating a much different Internet than existed in the past. Canada’s pioneering web content risks being forgotten among the billions of global internet users. Fortunately, dedicated web archivists have done us many favours in helping to keep Canada’s digital past alive. Here are just a few examples of web content that show off early Canadian digital culture.
Quebec’s First Provincial Website
In March 1995, six months before Québéckers voted “Non” to sovereignty by a very small margin, the Parti Québécois government of Jacques Parizeau launched a state-of-the-art website to show just how pioneering Quebecers could be. Parizeau even compares digital Québéckers to the early explorers of the St. Lawrence River in a video. Some notable features include the decided lack of use of the word “Canada” as would be expected for a sovereigntist government.
The Royal Ontario Museum
Many the Internet’s early advocates wanted to encourage people to use it as an educational tool. Given that many of the first Internet providers were universities, this is no surprise. The Royal Ontario Museum appears to have felt the same. Its 1996 website uses child-friendly graphics for the main web infrastructure, with a toy horse that navigates you to information about visiting the museum. They even included text navigation links along with the graphical ones to ensure accessibility both to persons with disabilities and those who did not have access to internet browser with the ability to produce images. The “Welcome from the Director” page, dated in 1995, asks users and organizations to share stories about what museums mean.
The Last Surviving Archie Interface
Downloading files from the Internet was no easy matter in the 90s. To get an article or report, you needed to use file transfer protocol or ftp and to do that, you needed to know the internet location of someone who had the file. Google could not help you here. Instead, you had the Archie search engine, which some claim was the world’s first. The Canadian connection is that Alan Emtage, its founder, worked for McGill when it was invented in 1990.
Open Text Search Engine
With annual revenues well over 1 billion dollars, and a staff of over 5000 people across the globe, Open Text is Canada’s largest software company. Not long after Archie was invented, they also became the producer of one of the earliest web search tools, well before Google was even a glimmer in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s eyes. The Open Text search engine turned Yahoo! from a glorified web link farm to possibly the most popular homepage of the early Web. Looking at this early website illustrates the importance of search to the development of early internet enterprises. Many Canadian software companies did not survive the dot.com bust of the 2000s, but Open Text continues to thrive as one of Canada’s greatest business success stories.
G7 Summit 1995 Halifax
Most websites show here so far have either stopped running or changed dramatically over time. Thanks to the Chebucto Community Net we can boast a live website that has operated non-stop for twenty-three years. The website is important for a number of political reasons as well. First of all, the Halifax Summit allowed then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to put Canada on the global stage at a time when Quebec Nationalists were promoting themselves as the future leaders of a new independent nation (see Quebec website above). Second, anti-globalization advocates sometimes refer to the 1995 summit as the “last friendly summit” meaning that they intended to put the environmental and social effects of global trade onto the political map. Mass protests in London & Seattle in 1999 and in Genoa and Quebec City in 2001 became emblematic of this unrest.
can.politics and soc.culture.canada during the Turbot Wars
In March of 1995, the Canadian Coast Guard captured the Spanish Trawler Estai, sparking a crisis between Canada and what would eventually become the European Union. An MP from Newfoundland, Brian Tobin, who happened to also be the federal Fisheries and Oceans Minister, decided to take a stand against illegal fishing in International Waters after the decline of the Atlantic Cod had all but eliminated the Canadian Atlantic fisheries industry. Canadians reacted on the Usenet to the rare show of military force in the most traditional Canadian way: with humour. One subject heading exclaimed that “Canada has balls!” while another asks what a “Canadian war cry” would be. One of the respondents said “car!” referring to what kids in a Canadian suburban cul-de-sac say when an impolite driver interrupts their street hockey game. This discussion and more can be found using Google Groups which opened when Google acquired the Usenet archive DejaNews in 2001. It’s not an easy hunt, but if you search for soc.culture.canada or can.politics and use the filtering feature, you should be able to find all sorts of entertaining discussions that happened in the early web.
Yahoo! Groups
The period from about 2002–2005 is interesting from a Canadian perspective. Google and Yahoo! appeared to be in a fight to take over discussion groups, which neither won because the public decided they preferred blogging and social media sites instead. As countries like China decided that it was in their economic and political interests to encourage their populations to access the Internet more people from all over the world could find ways to discuss the issues of the day with people of the same cultural background. For some Yahoo! Groups users, this meant they could discuss immigration to Canada. The service allowed individuals to create their own mailing lists with a click of a button and that meant an online cultural club could be created in an instant. Looking through the archives of Yahoo! Groups you can find international students, new and aspiring immigrants and Canadian citizens with a sense of pride in their foreign heritage learning new ways of surviving in the Great White North — everything from buying used furniture to learning English or finding a job.
BBS List for 416, 902, 514, 592 (etc) area codes
Just before the Internet became a thing, people earned their online communication chops via the Bulletin Board System or BBS. Instead of using an Internet Service Provider, people called other computers using their phone line. Once in, they could leave messages for friends or complain about the politics of the day much the same way we do today on Twitter. The only difference is that the timelines were not in real time. Instead, you usually spent your time listening to busy signals as you waited forever for some line-hog to take all day downloading whole MEGABYTES(!) of data. Reading through the list of BBSs is not unlike walking through a graveyard full of digital tombstones. It’s possible that some of the System Operators (SYSOPS) still have their data. As a former teen BBS user myself, I really hope archivists wait until I’m long dead before they bring out my inevitably dumb arguments back to light.
University of Toronto’s Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups
While the Internet today seems very politicized, political actors were trying to get their message out even in the early web. The University of Toronto Archive-It site offers a host of early political websites running from 2005 until the present. While the “big five” parties Bloq, Conservative, Green, Liberal, and NDP are all there, there are also some interesting marginal parties worth taking a look at. One of my favorites is the Rhinocerous Party, whose web address is www.eatgoogle.com.
Conclusion
An amazing story exists featuring Canadians of the early web. Hunting for great old websites is both fun and exhausting. For someone like me, it’s hard to believe that the Internet is history, yet there is so much that existed in the past that we no longer see today. There are so many research questions to ask, and so much data to be found. More attention should be paid to old websites.
