1995-96: REVIEW AND OUTLOOK : The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Surveying the Cyberscape : The Year That Going Online Became a Virtual Reality

Maybe it was when the Christian Coalition included a prescription for the proper use of the Internet in its 10-point “contract with the American family.”

Or when members of Congress started throwing around phrases such as “the underlying technologies of the Net,” and sending open letters to the “Internet community,” while contemplating how to regulate it.

Maybe it was when Wall Street greeted the public offering of Netscape, an Internet software company with hardly any revenue, by driving its price per share up sixfold over the course of several months.

Or it might have been when Bill Gates, the richest man in America and ruler of the biggest software company in the world, conceded that the Internet posed a threat to Microsoft’s technological hegemony.

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment, but sometime in 1995, the Internet got respect.

Sometime in 1995, the Internet ceased to be an amusing piece of esoterica that gave college students a new way to kill time--and no longer was it quite so cute that they were so much better at navigating it than their elders.

Electronic privacy, computer hacking, online libel, free speech and the distribution of pornography in cyberspace became part of the public discourse in 1995.

Cyberspace authorities registered 700 domain names a day in 1995, as American businesses rushed to claim a digital address. Demand for “webmasters,” a hitherto nonexistent job category, went through the roof in 1995.

And, mercifully, sometime in 1995 editors at newspapers such as The Times began allowing reporters to use the term “Internet” on first reference without attaching 12 dependent clauses of explication.

All of that is because, in addition to the growing fascination the global computer network has held for the moneyed and the powerful, the Internet in 1995 simply became part of life for millions of average people.

For me, the turning point came when my best friend from high school started skipping “My So-Called Life” to hang out in America Online chat rooms.

After rotating through the requisite cybersex variations, she took a short break, but lately she’s had to activate the parental lockout feature to prevent herself from excessive log-in time.

Another friend fell in love online this year--the second time for real. My Mom got an Internet address this year, and not from an online service with a pretty graphical interface, but one that puts her right on the Net with the hard core.

Of course, people have been kindling romance by e-mail for years, and cybersex is nothing new. It didn’t take until mid-decade for savvy parents to figure out the odds of hearing from their kids increased with the purchase of an Internet account.

But 1995 was different because these were my friends, my family. And it wasn’t just me. Suddenly, it seemed as if everyone knew someone who had had some meaningful real-life experience in the virtual world of the Net, whether or not they could comprehend it for themselves.

Many still can’t. Striking up intimate or, more often, inane conversations with anonymous strangers, hyperlinking across the digital universe to alight on Web site after random Web site just doesn’t do it for some folks, and perhaps never will.

Still, for many, the Internet this year hit close to home. Indeed, one study found that Net users were for the first time logging on more from home than from the office.

Many thousands of personal “home pages” were plastered on the World Wide Web this year, complete with photographs, poetry and assorted autobiographical information. Several new firms created indexes to organize them--and the ever-expanding number of 25,000 or so commercial sites.

Others, such as 27-year-old Robert Michael Toups, took it upon themselves to create their own Web catalogs: Toups’ controversial Babes of the Web site drew the ire of the National Organization for Women and more than a few Net chicks. Related sites included: Dav Amman’s Men Are Pigs and Shimrit Elisar’s All Men Must DIE.

Inevitably, the Internet’s elite culture was radically shaken this year by the influx of new Netizens into what had long been the private domain of scientists, academics and a few wayward hackers. Enforcing long-established Netiquette became a challenge; new responses to spamming, flaming and junk-mail are still in the works.

And 26 years after its founding by the Defense Department as a communications tool decentralized enough to (maybe) work after a nuclear attack, the government withdrew the lion’s share of its funding in 1995, encouraging its mutation into a commercial enterprise.

Other firsts this year included the first broadcast of a baseball game (Seattle Mariners versus New York Yankees), the first screening of a movie (“Party Girl”) and the first Michael Jackson online interview.

The first newspaper strike on the Net took place in 1995 as strikers from the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner put out an electronic tabloid, scooping the management-produced newsprint edition.

China allowed commercial Internet access to its citizens for the first time in 1995, and the governments of Vietnam and Singapore tightened control over their populations’ fast-growing use of the medium.

In Michigan, a student was suspended for posting a sexual fantasy involving a female dorm mate to an Internet newsgroup. At Caltech, a student was expelled for harassing a female student via e-mail.

1995 was the first year the speaker of the House of Representatives and the vice president of the United States engaged in a rivalry over which one more ardently supported the information highway. It was also the first year the former appeared on the cover of both Time and Wired magazines.

The first Internet moguls were made in 1995, as Netscape co-founders Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen saw the market valuation of their firm--which produces the most popular software for browsing the World Wide Web--grow to more than $6 billion after last summer’s public offering.

Hacker king and San Fernando Valley native Kevin Mitnick was apprehended in 1995--not for the first time but perhaps for the last--as the FBI caught him with 20,000 credit-card numbers in his possession.

The first Nielsen survey of the Net was conducted this year, concluding that 24 million Americans and Canadians aged 16 and above used the Internet over a three-month period, and a surprising 2.5 million Web users have purchased something over the Internet.

With its emerging blend of culture and commerce, the Net this year found itself at the center of some of the most pressing issues of a society that seems bent on spending considerably more time online in the coming years.

Many of them--free speech, libel, privacy and the security of information--have been dealt with time and again in other media and other forums. What makes it trickier with the Internet is that it is a far more democratic medium than we have ever had before.

The ability to talk freely with a vast audience of others, to publish one’s beliefs for the price of an Internet account, to posture and pretend and perhaps to purchase is what brought so many to the Internet in 1995.

And next year, as Congress continues to debate how to balance free speech with the protection of minors in cyberspace, as the courts continue to deliberate over what constitutes libel or a violation of copyright online and who should be held responsible, as companies such as Microsoft and Netscape and AT&T; and America Online vie to dominate the business of the Net, they might do well to remember that.