1994 | A Road Map to the Information Superhighway

Times Insider shares historical insights from The New York Times.

In the year 4 B.G. — which is to say, 1994 — Richard J. Meislin, who was then the senior editor for information and technology at The New York Times, created a web page called Navigator.

Before sophisticated search engines like Google existed, the World Wide Web wasn’t much more useful than a library without a catalog. As you poked around, it was clear that knowledge lurked everywhere. But finding specifics took patience and luck. You’d just grab books off the shelf in the hope that you’d come across what you were looking for.

When Navigator went live on an internal server on Nov. 2 (it would later be made public), the library suddenly grew a lot less formidable. In fact, it became inviting. We were given keys to all that knowledge. An inscrutable, unfathomable collection could be approached systematically, logically, topically and timely.

After more than 22 years of service, the Navigator page was retired last Friday.

When it was created, only a handful of Times employees were using the internet, Mr. Meislin said, generally through personal accounts at services like panix.com and pipeline.com, which had been created by James Gleick, a Times alumnus. Google did not yet exist. In July 1994, Gordon T. Thompson, who was then the manager of internet services, sent the first email communiqué to an nytimes.com address: “Test message from my Panix account.”

“O.K.,” he later acknowledged. “It’s not ‘What hath God wrought?’ or even ‘Watson, come here, I need you!’ ” (Mr. Thompson, who retired in 2001, died last week at home in Manhattan. He was 69.)

Mr. Thompson and Mr. Meislin were among the Times editors who understood early on that the institution’s fate was going to be tied to this intertubey thing. Mr. Meislin tried to impress that upon Joseph Lelyveld, who was soon to become the executive editor, at a dinner of farfalle with rabbit ragu in his Manhattan apartment in February 1994.

After dinner, Mr. Meislin sat his guest down at his home PC and typed Mr. Lelyveld’s name into a web browser.

“When he saw the list of things about him appear on the screen, he pretty much got it,” Mr. Meislin said.

For his part, Mr. Lelyveld said: “I remember having dinner at Rich’s house and him showing me stuff on the web. But I don’t remember him typing my name or eating rabbit. Maybe he didn’t tell me what was in the ragu. I’ve knowingly eaten rabbit only once or twice in my life.”

“I wouldn’t presume to query Rich’s version,” Mr. Lelyveld added. “He was our guide and mainstay then.”

Navigator had three main purposes, Mr. Meislin said: “To gather the amazing sources of information that people were finding on the web in one place and organize them in a coherent way; to let people build on the exploration of others, rather than start every adventure from scratch; and to get people excited about the potential of this new world of digital information that was opening up to them.”

Ours was not the only Navigator in town. “Navigator was the name that Netscape (which began as Mosaic) chose for their web browser,” Mr. Meislin said. “No relationship between them functionally, except that you could use your Netscape Navigator browser to reach The New York Times Navigator page. We were using the name first.”

Anyone looking at Navigator today would be struck by its dense, spartan appearance. “Design was so limited by technology in the early days of the web,” Mr. Meislin said. “The idea that massive amounts of information were a click away was the primary thrill at the beginning; the technology to permit attractive design came later. There were only a handful of fonts available on all browsers, different web browsers rendered HTML differently from each other, and there wasn’t much flexibility in altering horizontal or vertical spacing to improve readability.”

“And the Navigator page tried to be elegant in its simplicity,” he added. No easy feat, since it served two readerships simultaneously. Times journalists could use Navigator to file a photo assignment, submit an expense account, book a trip, look up an archived news article, sign on to Nexis or find out what was for lunch in the cafeteria.

But the page had a much broader public, thanks to the support of Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior Times executive most closely associated with the company’s early digital initiatives, who made it part of the nytimes.com website. It was a popular and well-received feature.

On Navigator, links appeared under categories: “Searching the Net? Here are Places to Start,” principally search engines; “Collections for Journalists,” a lot of government sites; “The Reference Desk,” from the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica to the upstart Wikipedia — “increasingly popular (but not uniformly accurate)”; “Telephone and Email Directories”; “Publications on the Net”; “Politics”; “The New York Region”; “Commerce”; “Travel”; “Entertainment/Culture/Pastimes”; “Sports and Recreation”; and finally “Demonstrations and Miscellany.”

The beguiling last category almost guaranteed that visitors would be tempted to scroll all the way through the long Navigator page in order to find the Cool Site of the Day, the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted, Sodaconstructor, Earthcam, the Dead People Server and Ghost Sites of the Web, described by Mr. Meislin as a guide to “some of the rusting hulks along the information superhighway.”

At the end, Navigator had become kind of a rusting hulk itself. Numerous links led to dead ends.

“I updated the public version regularly until February 2007, though for a general audience its usefulness declined as the power of Google grew,” Mr. Meislin said. “The internal version remained relevant longer because many of the collections there are useful to a journalistic pursuit but might not be found in the first page of a typical Google search. And while younger reporters (and web editors, who found Navigator joke-worthy after a time) might have thought it quaint, it still had its followers, so I continued to update it now and again until late 2014.” He retired two years later.

Navigator can still be explored as an artifact. It would make a great candidate for “Demonstrations and Miscellany.”

Too bad there’s no Navigator.