this is what amazon's page looked like in the 90s
as much as i enjoy a well styled neocities page, the web most people experienced in the old days looked more like this than anything
and look at this
they realized people would (for very good reason if you know how the internet works) be incredibly sketched out at putting their credit card info (hell, even a shipping address) into a website
payments on the web (so like. most of its theorized monetary value) would have been impossible without the invention of SSL
so in a few years it went from "don't ever put your credit card info on there because anyone who gets between you and the person asking (which by necessity of the way the internet works would have been MANY MANY PEOPLE) will be able to see it" to "thanks to the magic of cryptography nobody will actually be able to read your credit card info even if they do... touch it"
there's a good chance your random person didn't give two shits about the web in 1999 (or even if they cared about it, it certainly wasn't a conduit for their entire life). it had its shooters, but it was definitely still "for nerds."
the seminal book on web design from that era was titled "DON'T MAKE ME THINK" for good reason.
so you gotta think about how much of a collective public education initiative would have been needed to make the general public realize that:
a. there ARE "websites" it is safe to give your credit card to
b. that it is quite distinctly not all of them. anyone can make a website and just commit straight up fraud... or attempt to run a legitimate business grossly incompetently
...
man pagerank really was a miracle when you think about this
who on earth would have gone along with the whole "there are websites it is safe to buy things on" idea if every time you... yahoo'd for a page, your top result was whichever idiot spammed KEYWORD KEYWORD KEYWORD KEYWORD KEYWORD KEYWORD insert credit card here KEYWORD KEYWORD KEYWORD the hardest? it was a collective effort, a perfect storm of independent players all trying to be successful in their own right that made the web useful for as many people as it did.
anyways, all this leads me back to this:
i saw this banner a little while ago while e-filing my taxes. in 2026. 3 decades after SSL became a standard.
i love it. it is a relic of a bygone era of technologists fighting battles of, not quite the same, but an incredibly similar nature to the ones we have today
...
isn't it cool that this post is on my own personal cloud? she proudly posted from her mushroom pds. i love atmospheric apps. someone should make a banner for them.