When the Internet Changed Everything

I remember the early internet the way you remember a first apartment. It was rough. It was slow. It barely worked. And it was absolutely electric with possibility.

We're talking about dial-up connections that moved at speeds that would make your phone cry today. Pages that loaded one line at a time. Images that appeared from top to bottom like a slow-motion curtain reveal. You could go start a pot of coffee, come back, and a webpage would still be loading.

And yet — even at those speeds, even with that clunky, primitive technology — you could feel the world changing. Because for the first time, the gap was shrinking in real time.

Before the internet, if I needed to send a design to a client in another city, I was putting something in the mail. Or in the very best case, faxing it — and if you've ever seen a faxed design comp, you know that's barely better than describing it over the phone. But suddenly, I could email a file. Slowly. Painfully. But it got there the same day.

Before the internet, researching a client's industry meant phone calls, library visits, and collecting printed materials. Now I could search for it. The search engines were terrible — anyone remember AltaVista returning a million irrelevant results? — but they were still faster than driving to the library. Before the internet, building a brand presence meant print ads, direct mail, maybe a Yellow Pages listing if you were feeling ambitious. Now there were websites. And suddenly, a small design firm in Alabama could have the same digital presence as a big agency in New York.

The internet was the first real fold.

It didn't eliminate the work. You still had to design the logo. You still had to take the photograph. You still had to write the copy. But it compressed everything around the work. Communication that took days now took hours. Research that took hours now took minutes. Distribution that required trucks and mailrooms now required a click.

And something else happened that nobody fully appreciated at the time: the internet collapsed geography. I'm based in Gadsden, Alabama. Without the internet, my client base was whoever I could drive to meet. With the internet, I've worked with clients across the country and around the world. That's not a small thing. That's a complete redefinition of what's possible for a small creative business.

But here's the part of the story people forget: it was hard. The early internet wasn't plug-and-play. The equipment was slow. The connections dropped. The software was buggy. Building a website in the late '90s meant hand-coding HTML and praying it looked the same in Netscape as it did in Internet Explorer — and it never did.

We made it work anyway. We figured it out. Every creative professional who came up during that era developed a skill that doesn't get talked about enough: the ability to make imperfect tools produce professional results. We did workarounds on top of workarounds. We learned to think around problems because the technology wasn't going to solve them for us. That skill — the ability to adapt, to figure it out, to make the tool work for you even when it's fighting you — that's still the most valuable skill in any creative toolkit. And it matters more now, in the age of AI, than it ever has.

Because the internet didn't just compress time. It showed us that time could be compressed. It proved the concept. And once you see that — once you understand that the gap between idea and execution is not fixed, that it can be folded — you start looking for the next fold.