(2021) Really needs an update, as IPv6 in China picks up.

Also, can this data collection see enough of internal China traffic?

I read the title as an epitaph.

Picking 1997 as a start date is interesting because that's when ISP's had started serving Internet access to general public in Turkey. The state had subsidized this by waiving phone-call costs when dialing an ISP. That had caused sudden increase in Internet's popularity. I remember staying online until morning chatting on IRC, downloading stuff, browsing the web, playing MUD. Great times.

The title made me think it's a type of eulogy to the pre-AI, pre-ChatGPT Internet, but I was pleasantly surprised by pretty colours instead!

Internet in 1997. That is when the web was small enough that you did not need Google, you just used a 1200 page "internet yellow pages" book [1]

Around that time the book form became untennable so they started switching to CDROM versions [2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/luckmansworldwid0000unse_1997ed/... [2] https://archive.org/details/new-riders-www-yellow-pages-1997

Peacock Maps published a poster titled "The Whole Internet" with data collected in 1999. I think they had a second one in the early 2000s. This was the best I could find: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3...