( CNN ) -- It was 1993 when David Wood got his first look at the World Wide Web . Working as a consultant for the city of Palo Alto , California , in the epicenter of the dotcom universe , some researchers pulled up a Web page created by the Vatican , showcasing some of its artwork . `` The Web pages back then had that gray and black text and embedded images . There was no fancy layout ; it was very simplistic , '' he said . `` But it was powerful . I said , 'My God , this is it . This is what 's going to define the next phase of my life . ' It was a quite powerful , transformative concept . '' It 's hard for some of us to imagine now . But before broadband and YouTube , before instant streaming and overnight deliveries from Amazon , the early Web was a slow , simple and sparsely populated place . As the Web turns 25 this week , folks who remember those early days have been reminiscing about life online in the early to mid-1990s . One word that comes up over and over again ? `` Slow . '' A 1995 survey by the Pew Research Center found that just 14 % of U.S. adults had Internet access , and among them , only 2 % had access via a top-of-the-line 28.8k modem . `` That was screaming ( fast ) , '' said Lee Rainey , the director of Pew 's Internet Project . `` Now , that would make people riot in the streets , it 's so slow . '' Wood , now chief technology officer with linked-data company 3 Round Stones , would go on to a career on the Web and to author several books about it . But in the early to mid-'90s , it was n't always an easy sell . `` When I would show people the Web on dial-up , you 'd whip out a laptop and dial up with a 14.4k modem , '' he said . `` The page might take a minute or two or three or five to come down . You could see the hasher lines coming across from left to right as the page would slowly load . `` People would look at this and say , 'Why is this interesting ? ' `` Invented by Tim Berners-Lee , the Web made accessing the Internet ( no , they 're not the same thing ) easier for millions . `` The really early users were total geeks , '' Rainey said . `` They had to know coding . They had to know sophisticated prompts to get information from different places . They had to tell their computers so they would know exactly where to go . '' That started changing as folks started opening their mailboxes and finding discs from Web-portal services like AOL , Compuserve and Prodigy . But even that more-accessible Internet was a far cry from what we know today . `` It was mostly a text experience that was dominated , to some degree , by websites of major publishers who were just trying to use this new platform to essentially replicate what they already had , '' Rainey said . `` CNN.com was basically what was on television . The New York Times was basically what was in the paper . '' Take a look at early versions of some of today 's most popular websites , and the contrast is stark . Now , the homepage for the White House features an elegant design that incorporates hundreds of links to videos , photo galleries , podcasts and other media . In 1996 , the same URL took you to a stretched-out glob of black text on a plain white background , topped by the oh-so-catchy headline `` Search White House Press Releases , Radio Addresses , Photos and Web Pages . '' Go to Yahoo today , and you can scroll through a 95-image gallery of links to news stories , choose from a list of links to trending topics , check on your stocks or jump straight to Yahoo-owned services like Tumblr and Flickr . Time warp to 1996 , and there 's not a photo to be seen . Yahoo 's homepage featured little more than a pile of hyperlinks that left half the page blank . Oh , and that movie you streamed last night ? Or the song it took you 20 seconds to download from iTunes or Google Play ? Few Web users were even dreaming about them . `` If you had a music player or other streaming device , it was very scratchy , '' Rainey said . `` Words were interrupted . There were lots of hiccups in the server . But people lived with that because it was kind of exciting to have it happening in the first place . '' Wood concurs . For Web pioneers , and those who followed soon behind , experimenting with its emerging capabilities was , in part , its own reward . `` It 's like coffee culture versus tea culture , '' he said . `` With coffee , you 're gulping it down , trying to get your caffeine . Tea culture is more sipping and experiencing the taste . `` We had a sipping culture back then , and now we have a gulping culture . That 's the big change . It was a small number of geeks who were tasting this concept for the first time . We were getting little bits . We were tasting them , and we were saying , 'How could this change the world ? ' ``
Early Web adopters preferred the slower , simpler online life of the ' 90s . Tim Bradley - Smith launched the World Wide Web in March 1989 . Slow connections limited what websites could deliver . But in the ' 90s , just being able to access the Web was exciting for many .