\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through <\/em>The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.<\/em><\/p>\n The Atlantic launched its website in November 1995, 138 years after it first went into print. The magazine began in response to one information revolution; the website appeared at the dawn of another. Now, 30 years on from the launch, you can buy a copy of the first printed edition of the magazine on eBay, but you can\u2019t find much of the original website. The internet, notable for remembering just about everything, seems to have forgotten that particular piece of its own history.<\/p>\n In some ways, it\u2019s fitting that so few traces are left. The totality of the internet\u2014as both a gathering of information and a way of life\u2014has made imagining the phases of its history almost impossible. Even those who witnessed its beginning can barely remember. We may recall what the dial-up modem\u2019s weird dirge sounded like, but it\u2019s hard to quite recapture what happened after it stopped. The early evidence\u00a0 that does survive\u2014the wild optimism, the comically bad predictions, the Flash art\u2014are as easily mocked as they are forgotten. But the scattered remnants of the Atlantic Unbound, as the magazine\u2019s early digital forays were called, point to an idealism that was genuine in its moment: a time when people believed that online space could foster serious reading and intellectual exchange.<\/p>\n In December 1995, that year was hailed by Newsweek as \u201cthe Year of the Internet,\u201d marking the decisive turning point in online life. It was the year people began to move out of the closed ecosystems of services like AOL, where you logged in and didn\u2019t venture beyond its mail services, chat rooms, and internal content. You could reach the wider internet, but doing so was clunky and limited. And few had tried: Only about 14 percent of Americans had ever been online, and a little more than 30 percent of households owned a computer at all.<\/p>\n With the introduction of the Netscape browser in late 1994, ordinary people could venture into the wilderness of the open web. No one quite knew how to talk about what the internet was, mixing metaphors about the information superhighway on which you surfed.<\/p>\n Into this moment stepped The Atlantic, one of the country\u2019s oldest magazines. When its site went live, The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution included a notice in their printed \u201cOn the Internet\u201d page of its Sunday edition, which included a log of \u201csome of the newest sites on the World Wide Web\u201d: All Things Political, the American Kennel Club, George, Car and Driver, and \u201cthe venerable Atlantic Monthly\u2014established in 1857.\u201d A media columnist at Toronto\u2019s Globe and Mail questioned whether a magazine known to be \u201csober and intellectually challenging\u201d was really the best fit. Noting that three of the hefty features from that month\u2019s print magazine weighed in \u201cat 21,919 words\u201d total, he wondered if The Atlantic and online made the best pairing. \u201cSurely a length more suited to reading in a bathtub,\u201d he said, \u201cthan on a screen while the Internet meter is running.\u201d<\/p>\n The actual process of taking The Atlantic online may feel as quaint as the notion of \u201cthe Internet meter.\u201d As then\u2013editorial director for new media, Scott Stossel\u2014now the national editor of The Atlantic\u2014told me, building a website involved learning the relevant code by way of the book HTML for Dummies. Because the graphics were basic and the bells and whistles were few, the feat of making a webpage was well within the reach of what the special-projects editor, Wen Stephenson (now a correspondent at The Nation), described to me as \u201ca bunch of humanities geeks and one tech guy.\u201d Mostly, the work involved moving and formatting large amounts of text from the magazine onto the web\u2014something that was easy enough to do working from electronic files but harder when it came to posting treasures from the magazine\u2019s archive. Because text-recognition software couldn\u2019t make sense of the irregularities of 19th-century typefaces, Stossel told me the editors looked into hiring hand-typists\u2014perhaps the Trappist monks at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia\u2014to transcribe portions of the archive.<\/p>\n In the absence of more careful monastic textual-preservation practices, we are left with just one small trace of that original site to read. What survives shows how The Atlantic imagined the web\u2014not just as a novelty but as an extension of its literary and intellectual commitments. In April 1995, the magazine hosted a digital discussion on AOL with the poet Robert Pinsky, about his 1994 translation of Dante\u2019s Inferno. On the new website, any visitor could find selections of Pinsky\u2019s text, including audio files of him reading aloud. They could compare Pinsky\u2019s readings with a selection from the Atlantic co-founder Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s own 1867 translation, and navigate to Longfellow\u2019s sonnets on translating Dante, which he\u2019d published in the magazine in the 1860s. If they wanted to go really deep, they could click through to the whole of Longfellow\u2019s translation, as well as the original Italian text, both from Columbia\u2019s Digital Dante Project.<\/p>\n Such was the promise of the internet in its infancy. Information that had once required real effort to find and transmit (as monks knew well in their painstaking labors) was now together in one place. Pinsky himself had spoken in the AOL forum about poetry as \u201cbasically a technology of the sounds of language,\u201d one that could live across time. Here it was, available by dial-up connection on the screen of your pixelated monitor and out of your tinny speakers. If who was reading and why wasn\u2019t entirely clear (the Globe and Mail\u2019s columnist lamented that it was impossible to know \u201chow many Web surfers\u201d would actually read longer features), there was at least some sense that engagement was genuine and substantive.<\/p>\n Beginning with the magazine\u2019s partnership with AOL (dating back to 1993) and continuing to forums hosted on the open website, readers could chat with writers about the magazine\u2019s content. After sounding the alarm over\u00a0 the decline of reading in his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, the writer Sven Birkerts gamely came to The Atlantic\u2019s office to sit for an AOL forum. As Birkerts took questions (he himself tried to limit his direct interactions with a computer, Stossel told me, by dictating his answers), the pointed, thoughtful back-and-forth made it easy to see why some might well champion the digital culture Birkerts feared. Now, of course, the skeptics, like Birkerts, are the ones who appear to have been right: So much of online life feels hollow and overwhelming.<\/p>\n On the earliest surviving version of The Atlantic\u2019s website\u2014an archived page from November 1996\u2014a jaunty inkwell-and-plume graphic sits next to a cheerful invitation: \u201cclick here to increase your literary fitness.\u201d The link is dead, and no one can quite recall where it went\u2014not the people who were there, not Google, and not AI (ChatGPT took a minute and 35 seconds to tell me it couldn\u2019t come up with\u00a0 anything). That perfect remnant of the early internet\u2014earnest, hopeful about where we might be going\u2014is lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. The Atlantic launched its website in November 1995, 138 years after it first went into print. The magazine began in response to one information revolution; the website appeared at the dawn of another. 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