In her essay, A Vernacular Web (2005)
Olia Lialina describes the web of the mid-1990s as:
bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and
personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection
and a more powerful computer... it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com
ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
For more information on Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied's excellent research on the
amateur web, see: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age: Digging through the Geocities Torrent.