It's interesting that this article didn't mention Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota. Jean Amour Polly would have definitely known about it, as back then the Gopher Team was all about creating Digital Libraries.

And Mark McCahill was a ardent Windsurfer, which resulted in this shirt, designed by his partner Wendy Jedeckila, way back in 1991!

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10274778...

In the library of my high school, circa 1995, there were a couple computers for student use. There was a sign near them saying "No Surfing".

The article is very interesting but am I the only one that feels weirded out by how articles like these are published on the web?

There's no author information besides "Editor at SurferToday" in the HTML metadata. I understand that some people may wish to publish anonymously, but I think if you used a pseudonym like John Surfer it would at least feel like an actual person wrote it in our current era of AI-generated articles.

There's no date of publication. Of course the page itself may change with any CSS/template change and one of the great things of URLs is that you can modify the article with more recent information, still, having a date is kind of important.

There is no attribution. So is this an article of someone who interviewed her personally or is it a transcription of the video? The video is not by Surfer Today, it's from a channel called "Imagining the Digital Future Center" with 900 subscribers, but the actual brand on the video is called Internet Hall of Fame.

I've seen so many articles like this and it always feels so strange to me for some reason.

The term Channel Surfing predates all this by at least a decade. I first heard the term in the early '80, about the time when cable systems starting becoming the norm.

It's not too much a stretch to go from channel surfing to internet surfing.

Similar phrases that were, as it were, in the water at the time: bar surfing, bedroom surfing, boy/girl surfing.

I suspect a lot of these usages were regional, I know "bedroom surfing" was something I heard while living in Los Angeles. But "bar surfing" (and bar hopping) was common in the south as well.

Not trying to take anything away from anyone who first published the internet variations of this. But it was a thing before the internet.

The Adventures of Captain Internet And CERF Boy, October 1991.

"The LAN that time forgot"

https://archive.org/details/CaptainInternetAndCERFBoyNumber1...

Surfing the web.

"Surfing the internet" would probably be considered "unauthorised scanning" by someone.

At Yahoo! the department that maintained the directory of websites was called 'surfing' and the employees were 'surfers'. Their full-time job was to add summaries and categorize new websites. And who could forget the huge project of extending the 10 top level categories to 16?

The submission title is wrong. The title of the article is The women who coined the expression 'Surfing the Internet' not "woman", reflecting the two people the article discusses.

As a teen in the 90's, I remember the first time I heard someone use the terms "surfing the internet", "surfing the web", "information superhighway", "cyber-anything"... I can assure you the terms were as cringe back then as they are today. I half-suspect the desperate attempts by the media to make it sound hip to boomers may well have set adoption back years.

It's a good name, to me it's similar to "browsing the internet". Which in my mind is just "looking" around on the internet without necessarily contributing as such, like posting on blogs, playing names, sending emails etc.

Browsing the internet like just browsing in a store.

I guess we use Browsers to Browse the internet.

I'm surprised the .surf TLD is not more popular. It's only $20 on Cloudflare and a few others.

We didn't "Surf the Internet", we surfed the Information Superhighway. Before that we "browsed" like ruminants, consuming slowly with very strong stomachs, and sometimes regurgitating. Then we got caught in the "Web". Time's fun when you're having flies, as the spider joked.

Nifty little article and comments. Who know some many people used the term "surfing the internet" back then?

"The Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy” made me think of Vint Cerf. :)

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/49

I think most of us called it "going down a rabbit hole."

We don't surf the internet anymore. We now scroll social media.

pretty silly to credit someone for "surfing the web" when surfing was already used in the context of TVs, etc.

"I wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well."

I miss how fun the internet used to be. There is something lost with the current torrent of entertainment that is readily fed through popularity based algorithms. Hacker news is about as close as I get to that feeling, but it’s not the same since it’s completely hub and spoke. Youtube can come close in a similar way, if you stay away from shorts. But, what I really miss, is how often I found myself falling off the web into other places on the internet. gopher and telnet and archie. There were these other places to explore, and because the net was so much smaller it made sense to explore.

FWIW, I’ve had a similar sensation playing on a shared minecraft server recently, the stuff people build is so varying and interesting.

Okay now we need to track down that "information surfer" mousepad and figure out who designed it.