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Internet > World
Wide Web > History >
Online Service Rush To The Web
The major online services added millions of new users to the web in 1995, quickly making it a household word. 1995 was the breakout year for the Internet, when the connection of the large, online service populations to the Web made it known throughout the world. After a lot of technical and popular press covered use of the Web in university and corporate environments, millions of new home users obtained access to the web when Compuserve, American Online, and Prodigy provided gateways to the Internet. This immigration of a user population that was larger than the entire Internet community up to that point had wonderfully positive effects on the vibrancy and growth of the medium, increasing the population, content, pace of technological development, and network bandwidth growth. However, this sudden influx also brought with it an unprecedented scale to the Internet, and a democratic, popular voice to what had been a more scientific and engineering domain. This collision of cultures had painful effects that continued for several years in the newsgroups, which in some cases became almost unusable as they became overwhelmed by random and incomprehensible messages from new online users. IRC experienced a similar but lessor effect, since most online service users continued to use their service provider's proprietary online chat services. This democratization of the web had two significant effects:
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