The Internet Is A More Recent Phenomenon Than Is Popularly Thought

I didn't get online until 1994 (no, not AOL) and I think of myself as a relatively early adopter.

I have no thoughts about this.

There’s no news here. We were all there. Where were you, OP?

I love telling this to the younger people I work with (I'm 40): The very first time I got on the Internet was towards the end of my senior year of high school (I graduated in '98). Our teacher in a class called "Current Issues" told us we were going to the library to use the Internet instead of flipping thru the 'Newsweek' and 'Time' magazines we normally looked at in class. My friend in the same class had a parent who did digital design, so she was used to "surfing the web." She assured me I'd love it, but I was unimpressed with the Internet that day in the library.

(Six months later in college, I discovered the gay chat rooms and it was off to the races with meets up, porn, etc.)

Fess up. Which of our DL brethren didn't get online until 2001 or later?

Most young people would probably be shocked to learn that the World Wide Web was invented by just one guy, and that he's not dead or 100, but a sprightly 65 year-old. (Google "Tim Berners-Lee".) He is worth their time, because he consciously decided to give the technology to the world for free. If you look at how much money Bezos and Zuckerberg have made from little, doubtless transient, corners of his invention, you can begin to get what a gift that was.

Email was relatively popular, mainly as a work tool, from the late 1980s, but Net surfing came much later to most people. There was no graphical [Windows-like] browser till 1994. No Google before 1998. Sites like iTunes and MySpace didn't exist till into the 2000s. No YouTube till 2005, and computer memory and Net connections probably wouldn't have been strong enough to support it before that anyway. Then you have to remember that, even once all those things were available, it took years and years for the breadth of content we see now to be uploaded.

I remember using Lynx to browse websites before Netscape came along.

The smartphone revolution was a big step. The internet went from being something you "got on" to just a fact of life of being constantly plugged into the internet.

I worked in publishing and email was not used commonly until the 90s. I am sure people in production used it to electronically transfer galleys and page proofs, but no editor had access to it.

We were still typing on our selectrics then taking our manuscript to the Wang room where word processors retyped it into the computer system. None of us were allowed to touch a computer keyboard--unless we had been trained to do so.

I remember in 1991 getting a friend's college email and it had bang paths. Had to ask what an email address was. By early 1993 I was online, terrorizing the 127 other people who were on Usenet.

The internet as we know it didn't really come about until the so-called "Web 2.0" in the mid 2000s.

I'm sick of this shit. These bitches won't recognize what I invented. Its not fair.

R10 reminded me of how when I had just signed up for America Online and he gave me his email address. My husband and I could not figure out how to make it work. Later we found out that we had to use an "each symbol" for "at".

I remember in high school in the mid-90s going over to my uncle's house and hearing that dial-up sound -- that brings me right back to his house. He was a fancy techno-wizard nerd, I was amazed. When I went to college a couple years later I had email and then I remember immediately trying to find gay porn as soon as the "world wide web" was available.

Wait, let me Google what my thoughts are...

Now Usenet - a total online free-for-all dominated by fascist weirdos - is back, under a different name: Parler.

^^ I meant, a totally *unmoderated* free-for-all. I hereby "Oh, dear!" myself.

1997 was the first time I made it online, thanks to those AOL CDs. All dial-up, baby!

Halt and Catch Fire (a great, underrated show) gave an interesting glimpse at how “online” the tech sector was in the ‘80s. I know it’s fiction but assumed they tried to be mostly true to the chronology of Internet history.

[quote]Fess up. Which of our DL brethren didn't get online until 2001 or later?

I didn't get a computer until 2000. I used to go to internet cafes. It was my brother who said "You know, it's really about time..."

I originally got there on CompuServe in the early 1990s. We had a discussion forum (something like “celebrity gossip”) that was rather like the Datalounge.

My answer would be it's effectively 20 years old. The same age as Google, not coincidentally. It was the year when you could see the inevitable and irreversible momentum of the shift.

Before that was it research and experimentation, hobbyists (AOL and Yahoo and the chatroom set), scientists, government, and business.

The internet really took off for me when YouTube arrived. It changed my life. Instead of just reading stuff you could now watch stuff! You used to be able to download occasional videos, but it was slow...and risky.

And that led to a proliferation of people who don't necessarily have the requisite education/experience talking about stuff...but hey they have a YouTube channel! Along with some really good channels of course.

But its a double edged sword. Never has more information be available, but never has more disinformation been available.

[quote]And that led to a proliferation of people who don't necessarily have the requisite education/experience talking about stuff...but hey they have a YouTube channel!

All that talky stuff and DL's hated VLOGS came much later. Probably 2010. I used to link/post the gay ones on here early on - of course they'd all be torn to shreds. Once I was told off. Someone said I was a trouble maker for posting them on here. LOL.

[quote]Now Usenet - a total online free-for-all dominated by fascist weirdos

You bitch!

When I graduated law school in 1995 the firm I went to work for had just built out beautiful new office space.... with no internet connections. By 1997 they were retrofitting the entire space... converting a coat closet into the server room...

But, when I was in law school, all I did with my time was hang out in aol chat rooms...

My employer had it by about 1994. I helped build its first online trading platform. At the time, we thought we could charge for it. That portion of the project was discarded ion the first day.

I didn't have internet at home until 2001, when I started law school and the university provided 20 hours/week of free dial up access. Before that, I was at the library at least twice a week so I could read shit online. I always checked in at Drudge Report because he had the best collection of links to assorted news sources. I remember the day he announced the blue dress. Ah, innocent times. I was happy when Buzzflash started up so I could get my easy links without the Republican talking points. It's hard to describe what an enormous difference Google made with its search engine. Then blogs! I loved blogs! The early days of the liberal blogosphere were a sight to behold.

I also loved blogs, I loved using an RSS reader and going through the blog posts from websites I'd subscribed to. You could put them in chronological order so you'd get a real mix of topics that way.

Ha, r19, I used to go to the West Hollywood Library in the late 90's to use their computers before internet cafes. I remember one elderly lady a couple of computers down from me trying to logon, and exclaiming, "oh...." clicks a button, "oh my..." clicks another button, "Oh dear....", and trotted to the librarian to help her. I lean over to see what's going on, and there are like 20 pop up windows with hardcore gay porn on it.

Who the hell looks at gay porn in front of everyone at a library?

I didn't get a computer until 2006.

2000 was the tipping point for home internet becoming commonplace, and by the mid-2000s even your Aunt Edna in Bumfucke had a home computer with internet.

[quote]2000 was the tipping point for home internet becoming commonplace,

Interesting

I was surprised when I got mine back in 2000 how so many people seemed to be able to do all sorts of amazing things already...like send a photograph.

& talking with strangers on internet chat rooms seemed really bizarre...I was on AOL and used to chat about Big Brother which was a phenomenon in England at that time. I made my first cyber "friend" in there and he turned out to be really creepy. I've never wanted to meet up with anyone I meet on the internet ever since and never have.

Webcams also seemed amazing. Of course they were always whatever the word for catching up is....buffering.

[quote]Who the hell looks at gay porn in front of everyone at a library?

you did say the library was in West Hollywood!

A friend and former co-worker of mine started in publishing at a magazine where they got internet around 1995 and access was limited to my friend, who was the fact-checker. My friend's boss, the copy chief, used to ask her if he could use her internet after hours (for research purposes only, of course), and one day she found a page in their shared browser history for a foot-fetish site called In the Feet of the Night.

In the late 1980's I had a Bitnet account. Later around 1992 I got broadband. So had a net connection for a very long time.

How fast was broadband in 1992?

I was a total whore on gay.com back in the late 90s/early 2000s. Good times!

Broadband in 1992? Girl, I was using a 300 baud modem in 1992.