Tech Buzz Back then, the internet was envisioned as easy, convenient, and inherently sexist. Good thing that didn't come true!
why the cheesy semi porno sounding music?
"electronic correspondence machine" :)
i would love to be able to see the rest of this...
...also we have these:
Internet 1994
awesome web page design! plus....
"a global electronic mall is under construction!"
and again from a different year:
Birth of the Internet 1988
"now it's coming true because of internet." i wonder when they added the "the" to "the internet"...
4 comments:
Hey there Matt.. surprise surprise surprise again. I do read your blogs (The Journal should be out soon, btw).
To answer your question on my own, I would say the term "internet" was (back in my day - sigh) something that evolved after the later half of the 80's. Prior to that I was using 300, 1200, and even a 2400 (ooooo) "baud" modem to dial other computers (BBS's) over the phone. Baud for you younger readers basically means bits, therefore 1200 baud was about a byte per second. People who remember (or still have) "56K modems" are receiving 56 kilobytes per second. Imagine pulling up text-only and being able to read it as it's translating over a phone, line by line on your screen. Thrilling, 'twas.
Internet was a shortened term from "internetworking" that evolved after the common deployments/usages of systems like the infamous "FreeNets" in major cities, like Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, California (poly caltech comes to mind) which connected hundreds of people at once into one system of computers... eventually introducing "chat tables" that you could "sit down" with another user that has dialed in and have a half-duplex typing chat situation.. and I won't forget when they introduced "Telnet" which allowed you, while dialed in (on your phone - gotta remember the "line noise" you'd "see" on your screen.. ha), which allowed you to connect to other such FreeNets and universities across the country for free. Hence this internetworking subsystems were connecting using pre-established (and some newly established) phonelines dedicated for data - originally laid out in the late 50's as ARPANET (in case the "pinko commies" blew up America, we'd still be able to communicate across the country via underground wires connecting to Atari 800XLs and TRS-80 computers [laughing]) which was solidified in the early 80's with the first 56 kilobit per second dedicated lines across the country and thus multiple internetworking systems were accessibly merging by choice when needed.
Seriously, the word "The" was added when people started seriously looking at advances in technologies, modem speeds, looking at binary transfer instead of analog (read: "get rid of that damn line noise over the phone"). People like Compuserve, Janet and the beginnings of the evil AOL started connecting people to these various systems and subsystem, for a price (sigh).
UseNet, Bitnet, and even the TCP/IP Protocol (very important invention in the 80's, kept a bit hush hush until commercial usage in the mid 90's).
Mind you, this was all originally made for systems that had SIGs (Special Interest Groups) with a textual sense of being in a city using "go" commands to move about.
My particular favorite (in retrospect) was "go postal" which took you to the menu for the "Post Office" of the FreeNet, which allowed you to send messages to other people [without a need for what we know now as complete email addresses] by simply typing in their userID.. I was a moderator for the Music SIG on the Cleveland Freenet for almost 6 years, so my ID was "ai100", if I recall... it's been so long. Later that translated out to ai100@cleveland.Freenet.edu - and no, don't even try it. It's long dead. Just like the birth of video killing the radio star, THE Internet killed the need for now-archaic dialup systems like the Cleveland FreeNet or the Philadelphia FreeNet etc... sadly.
In the end of 1994 and into 1995, the European region with the work of an American scientist had been figuring out specific protocols for "browser" programs (Mosaic was a quick, old memory) which only interpretted usetnet and ftp etc, to have a world-established idea of a protocol.
That protocol was invented/agreed upon as using an "invented" (or glorified document with semantics) called Hyper Text Markup Language, or "html". The irony still baffles me because HTML isn't a language at all. If anyone remembers Print Shop for the Commodore 64 in the 80's, it's based off the same damn thing: if you want something bold, you put a "b" in brackets before the word you want bold, and finish it at the end with a "/b" in brackets. Ta da. Bold.
That isn't a language.. but hey, who's gonna argue back then? practicly 80% of "typical" humans (especially Americans) didn't own computers (my first one was 1984: A Texas Instruments TI-99/4a computer with a whopping 16K of RAM)... and the culture was rather technologically illiterate (I blame part of that on AOL because even when people started buying PC boxes with or without Windows 3.x [read: no icons and crap like we have now] and yet these people/customers didn't understand what was going on behind the scenes!). So who the frak cares if "L" stood for language... so scratch that.
So, whatever. Who cares. What is important, I suppose, is that a protocol came into existence to "serve" you these glorified document data streams by identifying the file to your computer's "browser" before data interception: (you see it all the time, Matt) "HyperText Transfer Protocol" ("http" ring a bell?) to tell a "browser" program to basicly go "oh, hey this is stream of data that will contain instructions on how to present this page.. and oh, I better examine some commands in the text incase I need to include images in the page I'm about to assemble, or make Martha Stewart's name bold and blinking... or not."
The important revelation was that with this new protocol, the creators needed to set some world guidelines to make this work on a global scale - originally by an English Professor (Tim Berners-Lee) and the European science group (c'mon we all heard this one... drumroll) CERN (think particle accelerators).
They formed an international compliance of rules to structure any and ALL HTML pages so that no matter what computer you had, if you had a "browser" program, the information shared across county lines, states, countries and continents would be "cross-platformable".
Hence the creation, assembly and birth of WWW3 (The World Wide Web Consortium) - the secret, sometimes unknown, overlords of what is properly "The World Wide Web" which is technically separate from the means at which ANY internet (but specificly THE Internet) transmits the www data. And then a naming issue and IP (Internet Protocol) numbers had to be worked into the mix, and since everything relied on the first data infrastructure ever made (or intended to be a data only infrastructure) was the ARPANET.
Yep, the military of the United States would become the backbone (one of many in this spineless cyber-world of now) and pulled from the darkness into the light of day for the public to use, and what was once used to mildly (from time to time) connect computer institutions came punching through, thrusting its virtual hips to the public like Rod Stewart asking if you think he's sexy, with very soon-to-be-smothered bumperstickers of data (oops, I meant "advertisements") called "banners" and now "ads" filling your screens with the content you hoped you wanted plus Pepsi and AOL ads in your face.
Woo hoo.
If I've answered it without blatantly saying it: The word "The" got added to the word "Internet" in our time when individual internetworking systems and subsystems were suddenly connected 24/7/365.25 via these connections as they serve pages and information SPECIFICLY for the use of the World Wide Web. A single, pulsating, soon-to-be-self-aware-if-we're-not-careful, fully (overly) connected "web" of computers that we can reach out to anytime anywhere, and for some (now more than ever) are just permanently connected - thus making The Internet grow.
So as an extra credit to this reply turned essay (oh Matt, I know you're lovin it... when have I ever opened my mouth in a response to any "blog" - a word in it of itself I hate from this post WWW world) interesting fact: Did you ever wonder now why Americans got to have all the ".com" domains while, until 1998/99, other countries could not?
Because we're Americans and apparently "damn proud of it" [sigh]... and the logic was, "hey, fine, a british scientist in a sea of CERN nerds and wonderful scientists... on the other side of the planet, came up with this whole html/http thang and spent 3-4ish years working on how to make it all happen... that's all good, but if they're gonna once again invent and use something based off of an invention already made by the military of the United States and make it something to be used by the public on a massively global scale... we want 'dibs' on the cool names. The rest of the world can kiss our feet and get country codes."
Not quite the words of ICANN (and Network Solutions), but even now-deregulated, the US government continues to have primary roles in approvals and even "root zone file" changes - a file that is the brain or the heart of the entire domain naming system to date.
But prior to deregulation the ONLY regulated company (American owned.... kinda... and I'm sure somehow proud of it... er, somehow) originally and I think is still in California, was instructed and controlled by assigning any "domain names" outside of the USA would end with a country code. You can find it.. we've all seen it (though now it's more in use for cataloging and identifying certain, more centralized bodies that exist in or "on" The Internet today): www.blahblahblah.ca is Canadian. ".de" is German, etc. etc. Even Luxemburg has it's own for the 500 computers that exist there I'm sure (it's humor, folks, let me go for it just this once - I don't hate Luxembourgians... I justknow it's really, really small).
The only interesting difference is England. Originally all their sites were www.blahdyblahdyblah.co.uk ... Why "co.uk"? Hmm... let's think about it. I think this might be one of personal conjecture, but it also might be one of those "hey we wanted .com's for everyone in the world..." but there was the US government constrolled ARPANET which wouldn't have allowed The Internet's World Wide Web to come into existence so "smoothly" and as globally without the US ARPANET's superstructure...
So perhaps they made an exception in honor of the English man - the "inventor" if you will - whose name you will undoubtedly see pop up over ad over now that you all know about it:
Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (yep, he's been knighted.... in 2004 I believe... geee, you'd think the Queen would be on top of things. I'm sure she enjoyed reading BBC Online and enjoying The Internet well before 2004... but hey, I'm not royalty.)
So, that, uncle matt, is a tip from your uncle larry - er, jason.. heh.
Cheers! [clink clink]
Crappage... honest mistake: 8th paragraph I cannot STRESS enough how horribly fast I type and with America Online stuck in my head in the previous paragraph I typed American scientist..
WRONG. I cannot stress enough: ENGLISH! ENGLISH! He was a bloody proud, tea-drinkin', crumpet eatin Brit! And I'm sure he and everyone else is proud of it. Hell, it impressed the Queen.. um.. 5 years ago.. I guess.
wonderful post! you covered about 2months of my webmaster class circa 2000 in one post :) thank you so much!
Sure thing. I might got lambasted for saying this, so here's my disclaimer: Kids, stay in school.
That being said.... my comment says alot about only taking 2 Art History classes in college vs. experience in corporate work world during the boom of the "dot com" period of the end of the 20th century... heh heh
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