Gulf War. COMECON and the Warsaw Pact dissolved. Baltic States become independent. Break-up of the Soviet Union.
New applications bring in new terms and new users. The new media age began.
Local Finnish Internets were speeded up as the universities were linked
together by a 100 Mbit/s FDDI fibre-optic-cable ring, into a Telecom
Finland metropolitan-area trial network, and the Ultranet network, which
theoretically runs at speeds of 1 Gbit/s, was acquired for use with the
supercomputer.
CERN releases the World Wide Web globally and Minnesota University its rival
system, Gopher. Gopher was initially more popular because of its
simplicity. It was basically a distributed hierarchical menu system for
browsing files, and could be used without converting text documents to HTML
format. WWW browsers were also able to call up gopher and ftp servers, if
required, thus being able to access other network services from the same
interface.
Wide Area Information Service, or WAIS, also attracted a lot of attention. This was a publicly accessible method for searching databases on the Internet. Search results could come from various databases in different parts of the world, or the response could also be an entire retrieved document. WAIS databases were used a lot via Web and Gopher servers, and nowadays virtually all databases are hidden behind a Web user interface, so that ordinary users no longer need a special WAIS interface.
The Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption protocol was released globally. This allowed anyone to send e-mail so well-encrypted that the US government classifies it as military-grade technology, which cannot be exported from the USA in electronic form. The latest version has actually been brought to Europe in book form and scanned into a computer.
The first Linux version is released on the NIC.FUNET.FI server. It takes still some time before it grows to be one of the most popular Internet application platforms.
In the USA, the NSFNET brought in T3 (44,736 Mbit/s) links on the Internet backbone and the Nordic NORDUNET link to it was upgraded to run at 512K bit/s.
NSF policies restricting commercial use are lifted and the Commercial Internet eXchange Association, Inc is formed.
