Offered here is one of the earliest of the PC Computing posters. Inspired by subway maps and the innovative posters of A.M. Cassandre, artist Timothy Downs applied, maybe for the first time, a spatial hub-and-spoke metaphor to depiction of the content and connections that made up the Internet. Here subway stations and lines are replaced by servers and sites: “Points of interest are organized around major Internet servers. Radiating from each server are descriptions of key locations and their addresses. Each listing was confirmed online. Just rev up your modem and pick your destination.”
The map helpfully provides URLs for each servers and capsule summaries of content, occasionally with a bit of editorial opinion. Of the Dun & Bradstreet site, for example, Downs writes “Not as interesting as this site promises to be, right now we get a few screens about D&B’s services” whereas the Mother Jones site is “as informative and interesting as the print version.”
Two features of the map are striking above all: The first is the near absence of the private sector and the dominance of government agencies and educational institutions as both hosts and content providers. The second is the “emptiness” of the “landscape,” which features perhaps 30 servers and maybe a couple of hundred sites (According to Internet Live Stats, as of today, August 8, 2022, there are nearly 1.974 billion web sites.)
Though presumably printed in large numbers, the map was ephemeral and must have had a very low survival rate. It is rare on the market, as are other related maps issued by PC Computing in 1995-96, and few institutional holdings are recorded.