Foreword

by Nir Eyal

I remember the first time I saw a URL. It was 1995, I was a teenager, and I was flipping through my hometown newspaper when I spotted a movie ad. At the bottom were the words “Check us out online at www . . .”

I had no idea what “www” meant, but being the nerd I was (and still am), I rushed to my computer. Eagerly, I waited 5 minutes for the spinning disks to boot up and weathered another 10 minutes of crashes and reboots.

Finally, I was able to type the URL into my Internet service provider’s search bar, and Prodigy promptly took me nowhere. Instead of a web page, I got an error message.

Not that it would have mattered much.

Let me remind you that 1995 web pages were truly terrible. A look back at websites of yesteryear ...

Get Mobilized now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.