One last trip to the internet in 2009 with The Rough Guide 14 | Jonathan Jones homepage: planetjones.netOne last trip to the internet in 2009 with The Rough Guide 14<br>Sunday, April 19, 2026<br>After the relative success of my last post about what is probably my most-read book ever (The Rough Guide to the Internet 1996), and after a £5 bid that had no competition on eBay, I am back with a dissection of the last edition of this book in 2009. The book is now an ugly shape and format - no longer pocket-sized. Broadband is mainstream, internet calls are possible thanks to Skype, Google is the de facto choice for search, and Twitter is up and running with its 140-character limit.<br>Getting online in 2009<br>Surveys in the book estimate 1.5 billion people were using the internet, which is a considerable jump from the 45 million in 1996!<br>The Rough Guide states you can "squeeze online" with a 486 IBM-compatible PC, but they recommend either a Pentium II 200 MHz or Mac G3, each with a whopping 64MB of RAM. This was also the era of the Wii and PS3 games consoles, each of which could access the internet, with the Wii shipping with the Opera browser - an experience kindly referred to as "not flawless."<br>Broadband (a term in 2009 meaning anything from 512Kbps to 24Mbps) had arrived, with cable and ADSL becoming the de facto choices - although dial-up still featured prominently. Broadband providers were moving away from unlimited plans and introducing the dreaded data caps. AOL was far from a recommended ISP at this point, and there's a reference to a campaign to collect 1 million of the AOL free trial CDs and dump them at their headquarters; an initiative that ended with approximately 200,000 CDs being delivered back to the doomed AOL for recycling.<br>Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and tethering are mentioned. In 2009, the iPhone and BlackBerry were available with 3G connections, which were steadily replacing WAP (referred to as "Worthless Application Protocol" or "Wait and Pay"). BlackBerry is described as "popular with corporate types" - history would prove its popularity wouldn't last with any types, though.<br>Android isn't mentioned in the book, and I don't think it became "mainstream" until 2010. There's still a sizable section describing how to find internet cafes, net-enabled phone booths, and the now-ubiquitous Wi-Fi hotspots.<br>One other reflection I had when reading the book was that while mobile internet was becoming prevalent in 2009, we didn't yet have mobile-first web design; I remember many pages being very difficult to navigate on a mobile screen. Overall, in the 17 years since the publication of this book everything has gotten faster, but in 2009 the foundations of how we use the internet (mobile, multiple devices, broadband) were firmly in place.<br>The Software<br>Let's do this in order of popularity at the time:<br>Internet Explorer : IE8 was the most recent version.<br>Safari : described as an excellent browser and, surprisingly for 2009, available for Windows users (support ended in 2012).<br>Firefox : 5 years old and described as an "excellent browser" thanks to its extensions and fewer vulnerabilities to harmful scripts.<br>Opera : "very fast and worth trying."<br>Chrome : described as in its infancy, but Google's browser was on the verge of a meteoric rise that would overtake Internet Explorer in the coming years.<br>The internet's brutality is perfectly demonstrated by comparing the 1996 Rough Guide, where Netscape Navigator was the "only choice," to the 2009 edition where it's dead, buried, and never mentioned again.<br>Bookmark websites were fairly popular in 2009, with Delicious mentioned alongside Digg and StumbleUpon. As were browser plug-ins. All of the following are now consigned to the digital dustbin, but they were listed by The Rough Guide as essential in 2009:<br>RealPlayer<br>Flash Player<br>Shockwave Player<br>Windows Media Player<br>I have some good memories of the Flash player, but absolutely nothing to miss about RealPlayer and the dreaded WMV format.<br>Googling<br>Yes, in the Rough Guide to the Internet 2009 there is a whole chapter called "Googling," with merely a sub-heading suggesting there are "other ways to search."<br>Google is described as having the "biggest, freshest database" with the "most relevant results on top," and is further praised: "there's rarely a need to use any search engine other than Google." The kings of the 1999 search scene - AltaVista, Lycos, and Infoseek - are nowhere to be seen. In 2009 you just "Google it." There's even a two-page spread called "A rough guide to Google wizardry," which teaches you how to find synonyms, linking pages, and ask Google to perform calculations and conversions.

If that's not enough Google, you are directed to Google Alerts (still alive), Google Answers (died in 2006), iGoogle homepage (died with its gadgets in 2013), Google Labs (died in 2011, but has been resurrected again in the era of AI), and more, including some that are still here today like Google Mail and Google Docs.<br>Email, chat and...