See What the World Looked Like When the World Wide Web Was Born
The World Wide Web turned 30 this week, and everyone was celebrating as best they could — making big lists of every Internet-related topic we’ve been doing (or obsessed with) over the past few decades .This includes dial-up modems, AOL,avatar andcomic-basedchats , and theHomestar Runner are just a few of the things that come to my mind when I think about what the Internet was like when I was growing up. Oh yeah, happy puppy . Remember when you got games from Happy Puppy? Sigh.
Instead of taking a few minutes to remember what it was like to browse the web on a 13-inch CRT monitor, I have another idea. You can still browse one of the many great, nostalgic reviews and fondly remember the digital days gone by. But while you are (or shortly after), visit the Google Timelapse site.
The slow motion picture above is a feature of the Google Earth Engine. It has absolutely nothing to do with the history of the Internet. However, it gives you the opportunity to see what the real world looked like 30 years ago – 32 years, technically. As Google describes:
“It consists of 33 cloudless annual mosaics, one for each year from 1984 to 2016, which are available online through the Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab Time Machine library , a technology for creating and viewing scalable and panned time lapses in space and time. … …
Using the Earth Engine, we have combined over 5 million satellite images from 5 different satellites over the past three decades. Most of the images come from Landsat , a joint USGS / NASA Earth observation program that has observed the Earth since the 1970s. In 2015 and 2016, we merged Landsat 8 imagery with Sentinel-2A imagery, which is part of the European Commission’s and European Space Agency ‘s Copernicus Earth observation program . ”
Now you can see how both worlds have changed over the past 30 years: the real world and the World Wide Web. While Google highlights a number of interesting places on Timelapse that are worth checking out, you can navigate Google Earth to visit any location to see how things have changed over time.
Satellite imagery isn’t always the best – at least compared to the high-resolution imagery that Google Maps now has – but it’s a great way to visualize the slow, relentless march of humanity. And you’ll have more fun navigating Timelapse than trying to remember your old Neopets password.