After a decade of writing about the digital world in this, North Dakota's oldest continuing newspaper column about the Internet, I have come to one seemingly contradictory conclusion: The Internet remains the same, but always in a different way.

Consider:

- The trial of a celebrity in California fuels an online feeding frenzy as people turn to the Internet for images and information.

- An upstart, easy-to-use Web browser challenges the market dominance of an older, rival browser.

- The Internet's hottest search engine leaves its competitors in the dust as it unveils one new search application after another.

"Ah," a dedicated Net watcher might say. "You're talking about the Michael Jackson trial, the Firefox and Explorer browsers and the Google search engine."

No so.

This was the Internet, circa 1995.

The celebrity trial was O.J. Simpson's.

The upstart browser was Internet Explorer taking on market leader Netscape Navigator.

The innovative search engine was Yahoo.

It's the same Internet as before, only different.

Sure, there are more people online these days, accessing more Web sites at faster speeds on more powerful and cheaper computers.

But the function of the Internet, the reasons why people go online and the things they do while online have remained constant.

Technology has changed over the past 10 years. Human nature has not.

The Internet is a reflection of both.

When this column first appeared on Feb. 14, 1995, the typical home computer consisted of a 486 microprocessor running at a clock speed of 66 megahertz, 8 megabytes of RAM, a 2x CD-ROM drive, a 40-gigabyte hard drive, a 3.5-inch floppy drive to handle the 1.4-megabyte disk, a VGA color monitor, a 14.4-kilobyte-per-second modem, a dot-matrix printer and (for most of 1995) the Windows 3.1 operating system. Computers with the Pentium I microprocessor, 100-gigabyte hard drive and a 28.8-megahertz modem were available - for a price.

All in all, the average computer system cost between $2,300 and $3,500.

Today, you can buy a computer for one-fourth that price that is four times as fast, has four times the RAM memory and offers four times the hard drive storage space.

The 1.4-megabyte floppy disk of 1995 has given way to today's writable 4.7-gigabyte DVD disc. The one color, text-based dot-matrix printer of a decade ago has surrendered to the modern full color, photo quality inkjet printer.

The machines today are faster and more powerful. But they do the same thing they did 10 years ago: Connect us to the Internet.

In 1995, there were three ways to access the Internet: Indirectly through a commercial online service like America Online or Prodigy, directly through an Internet service provider or by dialing into a bulletin board service.

Any choice was relatively expensive at the time. For example, America Online offered five hours of online access to its commercial service for $9.95 a month. If you went over the five-hour limit, a $2.95-per-hour charge kicked in. Thus, if you were online at AOL for just 15 hours in one month, it would cost you $39.45.

Accessing the Internet through a local Internet service provider was cheaper. For $15 to $25 per month, you could go online for about 20 hours per month through providers such as Internet Connection of Bismarck, Magic Internet Services of Minot, Dakota Internet Access of Williston, Red River Net of Fargo and a handful of other ISPs around the state.

If an ISP wasn't located within your local call area, then going online meant paying long distance charges in addition to the monthly service fee.

The third choice, dialing in to a BBS, also meant long distance charges since most of the BBSs worth visiting were located outside North Dakota.

And, given that you could download an average of only 1 megabyte every 10 minutes over a 14.4 modem, those monthly phone costs could climb quickly.

Today, going online is cheaper, faster and simpler: Usually just one monthly fee for 24/7 access. High-speed cable modem and DSL services allow you to now measure your downloads in gigabytes. The time you spend online is no longer a direct part of your access cost.

In many ways, 1995 was a pivotal year in the Internet's development. The Web browser (specifically, Netscape Navigator 1.0) caught on with the public and, in less than a year, helped transform one small part of the global Internet known as the "World Wide Web" into what is, essentially, the Internet as we know it today.

Prior to the browser, you would access files on computer servers using search and display protocols like Gopher, WAIS, Lynx, Telnet, Archie, Veronica. These were all, essentially, text-based programs that displayed directories or lists of resources you could visit.

Nothing was really clickable - you simply drilled down level after level in the directories until you found what you wanted. Finding information online was time consuming, frustratingly slow and not always productive.

The Web browser changed all that. It united the concept of clickable links (more accurately, hypertext transfer protocols, or HTTP) with a simplified text and image formatting language (HyperText Markup Language, or HTML). The result was the Web page with simple, clickable links. And the rest, to borrow a worn cliche, was history.

In August 1995, Microsoft unveiled Windows 95, a huge evolutionary step forward from Windows 3.1. More significantly, a Web browser known as Internet Explorer 1.0 came bundled with Windows 95, kicking off the "browser wars" and laying the groundwork for lawsuits against Microsoft's operating system monopoly.

At the end of 1995, it was estimated there were about 45 million people worldwide accessing the Internet, with 30 million of them in the United States and Canada.

Today, recent figures put the global online population at 687 million, with 159 million in the United States.

What were people looking for or doing online in 1995? The same things they're doing today.

Consider this observation from a Pew Internet and American Life Project survey of what Americans do online:

"On a typical day at the end of 2004, some 70 million American adults logged onto the Internet to use e-mail, get news, access government information, check out health and medical information, participate in auctions, book travel reservations, research their genealogy, gamble, seek out romantic partners, and engage in countless other activities."

That mirrors the results from surveys in 1995 and 1996, which identified the main reasons people went online: Check and send e-mail, search for news and information, look for health and hobby resources and simply browse the Web.

More people are accessing the Internet at faster speeds using more powerful computers.

But they're still doing the same things online they did a decade earlier.

That might be changing.

I suspect 2005 will be another pivotal year in the Internet's development. There are no surveys or statistics yet to validate this view, but it seems to me more people are going online to visit and use specific elements of the Internet rather than browsing or searching the Internet as a whole.

Young people don't "surf the Web," they digitally hang out in instant message chat rooms, carrying on multiple conversations with friends and other visitors. What the telephone was to a teen's social life in the 1960s and 1970s is what MSN Messenger is to today's youth.

Blogs, bloggers and blogging have carved out a "must-read" corner of the Internet, fueling digital discussions on everything from daily life to politics. Indeed, a number of political blogs helped shape some aspects of the 2004 presidential race.

The growth of high-speed Internet connections at home is transforming the way music and videos are sold and delivered. The Internet is becoming the "transaction middleman" between an available audio or video product and its ultimate destination on a personal music player or video machine.

Online shopping is taking over another corner of the Internet. Whether it's discount stores like Overstock.com and Half.com or online auction sites like eBay, uBid and Yahoo! Auctions, more people are using the Internet for their holiday, special event and personal consumer purchases.

Just as the World Wide Web grew from being a part of the Internet to becoming the Internet, any of these specialized online functions might yet emerge to become the Internet as we know it a decade from now.

It's been an interesting 10 years online. I can't begin to imagine what the next 10 years will bring.

I suspect it will be more of the same, only different.

(Keith Darnay is the webmaster and designer for bismarcktribune.com. He started this column before he came to the Tribune in 1999. His Web site, featuring this column going back to 1995, is at http://www.darnay.com/iec.)

Web sites worth visiting

- The Wayback Machine

www.waybackmachine.org

A digital library of Internet sites going back to 1996. Simply enter the URL of the site you want and you can view the site as it appeared at different times over the past decade.

- Deja Vu

www.dejavu.org

View Web sites through "ancient browsers." What would your favorite site look like in Netscape 1.0 or Internet Explorer 2.0? Find out here.

- GVU WWW User Surveys

www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys

One of the Internet's pioneering online survey efforts, you can access the 10 users surveys conducted between 1994 and 1998. An interesting historical insight into the growth of the Internet.

- Hobbes' Internet Timeline

www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline

A popular "thumbnail" guide to the Internet, from 1957 to today.

- Computer History Museum

www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/internet_history A well designed timeline tracing the growth and development of the Internet.