Ah, the mid-late 90s internet. A time of walled gardens, such as AOL and MSN. Both positioned themselves to be your portal to the World Wide Web, giving you curated access to the internet through bespoke ‘web portals’ and trying to keep you away from the wilder and more freewheeling areas of ‘the ‘net that might scare you off. To make internet access as recognizably comfortable as flipping through cable channels.

I actually don’t have all that much experience with either of them. By the time I got regular internet access in 1999, I was getting it raw. I’d just open up Internet Explorer and type whatever into a search engine, likely Alta Vista. So, this will be a voyage of discovery for me too, and you’ll be getting my reactions raw too as I explore this particular multimedia CD-ROM more or less blind. I did fire it up briefly to check that it was as juicy as it sounded, but no further than that.

From what I can see on the Internet Archive listing, this was released in the UK and given away with an issue of a computer magazine, likely Personal Computer World.

Popping it into our virtual machine install of Windows 98, we see this as the disc icon, and get an MSN Start-Up CD menu.

We are curious about MSN preview, and it’s what we’re here for, so let’s click that.

Inside, we’re greeted by a host of characters from all walks of trendy, acceptably normal 90s life. It serves as a timepiece for the kind of folks that MSN envisioned would be their core audience – or hoped them to be: young professionals, couples, and well-to-do older folks.

There’s an only slightly cringeworthy quality to the production. They want to feel like there are just regular folks on the World Wide Web. A world away from the forum flame wars, anime and furry porn sites, and frothing UFO conspiracy theorists that characterised my experience of the net at the time. Well, unless you’re brave enough to visit Channel Five… but more on that later.

After the introductory sequence, we’re moved along to the hub for this preview. The presentation feels like the kind you might see in Spycraft or other FMV games of the time, with looping animated digitisations. The FMV quality is honestly pretty good for the time and clearer than the kind I was seeing on my PlayStation in ‘96.

From what I can gather, there were six channels on the MSN portal, each covering a different subject. Channel 1 is MSNBC, which they seem particularly proud of and hustle you to explore first. I can see why, though, given the 200 million dollar cost of establishing MSN and NBC’s joint news channel venture.

Brian Williams enthuses about the fusion of cable news and the World Wide Web and its power to bring you on-demand news updates. As someone who grew up with Ceefax and Teletext in the UK, this would have been somewhat less of a revolution, but for any news junkie who didn’t and was looking for reasons to ‘get connected’? I can see how this would be a hook.

Channel 2, despite being subtitled Games, Showbiz, and Drama, enthuses about the benefits of email and staying in contact with far-flung family online. “More thoughtful than a phone call.” Perhaps it means family drama, oh no!

Our man here is our home office professional and serious business and culture rep, interested in the arts, science, and managing his investment portfolio. “An active mind is a healthy mind.” Well said, sir.

Ah, Health, Wealth, and Self. Represented by our couple here who love Thai food (and beer) so much that they used Encarta to learn more about the country and Expedia to book flights to visit it. And now they use email to keep in touch with new friends there!

As someone who used Expedia and Skyscanner extensively in the early 2000s and the strong pound to dollar value to book flights to the US, this is the kind of recommendation for internet use I can get behind! It just shows how early ‘e-commerce’ got its start. 1996 is pretty early on in internet history, and yet, here it is, doing the same kind of stuff then as you would now. But then, the ‘dot com bubble’ didn’t just pop out of nowhere, did it? Though it did pop just a few years later.

Ah, now here we have what I feel is MSN’s disclaimer that the web can be a wild and woolly place and that they can hook you up with that if you dare them to do so! Our gal here has a bunch of vanilla on the streets, kinky in the sheets energy. “Channel Five is where you go for an URGE for something different, you know, something EDGY and INTENSE, and you’re too stupid to stop.” And the way she calls you ‘the user’ at the end makes it rhyme with loser.

And finally, in the preview for Channel Six, Comics, Teens, and Fun. “He’s a gamer, and she’s a jock”, they joke, as they each gush about talking to friends all over the world, preparing for ‘Spikes World’ and getting the latest gaming news. Had I had MSN back then, I’m sure this (alongside the enticing Channel Five) is where I would have spent my internet time, paid for by the minute.

And that’s that! The only other thing you can do is to join MSN, which our host will relentlessly badger you to do if you don’t click on anything for more than five seconds.

Given how video-heavy this one turned out to be, it’s been more challenging to put exploring this disc into words and still images. But I hope I succeeded in giving you some flavour of this timepiece of Microsoft’s vision of the web going into the New Millennium. A more gentrified Internet just a few years after its creation.

Of course, web portals and walled gardens of internet access would eventually fall by the wayside, but here in 1996? They likely did seem like the future of the mainstream web.

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