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Perhaps the earliest commercially printed "map" of the internet, published for MacUser Magazine in 1995.
MacUser's 1995 Internet Road Map provided a schematic map of the internet, highlighting "points of interest" and major sites. The map was advertised in the August 1995 edition of the magazine.
Published by Ziff-Davis, the Internet Road Map was a supplement to MacUser magazine and edited by Jason Snell and Shelly Brisbin. The map was compiled by Geoff Duncan and was intended to explain the intricacies of mailing lists and LISTSERVs, FTP (file-transfer protocol), and ISPs (Internet Service Providers).
The map itself included topic zones grouped into Business and Commerce, Arts and Humanities, Internet Reference, Education and Reference, Government Information, and Macintosh Resources. MacUser sat in the near-center of the map, with a URL pointing readers to its website.
The map highlights an early vision of internet use and organization. Just as the printed mapping of the world evolved over the course of 500 years, so it seems that this "vision" of the internet is reflective of the earliest times exploring "the web," and it would be fascinating to imagine how someone without reference to the present map would lay out a similar schematic vision of the web in 2016.
It should be noted that the small image of this map shown above would have taken roughly 5 minutes to download and the larger image we provide would have taken nearly a full day to download.
