Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video] (opens in new tab)

The parent comment is 6 minutes, but the full 15 minute interview (about more the the internet) is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLf6KZmJyrA

Also check out Arthur C Clarke (author of the 2001 Space Odyssey) predicting internet connected personal computers and remote work in 1974

https://youtu.be/OIRZebE8O84

Two years earlier, he dismissed it as "just a tool like a typewriter": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmxOq9STmQM, so it's interesting how he evolved. He does already say that he liked immediate feedback from comments about the show the night before, so the point about the audience was already there.

This is consistent with Bowie's genius to be more an early adopter type than a visionary type. A hell of an early adopter.

Napster came into existence in '99

I sort of arrived at this as well in my comment above. This is mainstream media with a more outsider take vs insiders actually building stuff on the internet. I still don’t think anyone really had the vision of everything today.

> Early Internet still reflected that world order.

Early internet had little to none of that world order. Those corporations are slow to act and tend to be last to the party.

I think you're conflating people from that world order and how they interpreted the internet, with how the internet actually was.

> User-generated content lived in the fringes of the Internet in those days. It was the plebs' place. The unwashed.

User generated content was a large majority of the content of the early internet. Usenet. MUDs. Email. Forums. Random people's university websites.

> Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything

Unlike today, right?

GeoCities started taking off in early 1996, at the same time NYTimes.com started publishing. Of course there was AOL and personal webpages before that.

I hear "knew their place" and all I can think of is that they knew they were watching ads... now many people think that all their content is free (like information wants to be ;^) not realizing they are are the product being sold.

It's not like tiktok/Insta or the news/blog promotional articles are anything but ads... people just don't "know their place" any more.

"Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products."

I would say that describes the online world now, not at the internets adoption in 1990s.

> Early Internet still reflected that world order. It was a one way street in which the people consumed what the corporations produced. There weren't even comment forms under any article in any prominent publication. After all, who are you, a lowly pleb, to comment under an article in which a glorious, 6-figure columnist from the 'right background' wrote. Know your place.

I think this is a fair statement for the world wide web (although there were pretty notable standouts, particularly in the very late 90s), but every other protocol was far more democratized with very little corporate influence, and those protocols were far more relevant in 1994 than they are now.

Exactly the opposite of this happened. Almost all content on the early-mid 90s web was user-generated. The bulk of it was personal "homepages" with low production values describing hobbies or technical interests.

Very few large corporations had even heard of this crazy new "Internet" thing in the 90s, and even fewer cared. Almost none had a corporate webpage even listing their address and phone number, much less produced any content at all.

Many had the .com domain name corresponding to their corporate brand registered by domain squatters they later had to buy it from. Some didn't even notice for years.

The PLATO system had online user feedback in the 70s, and users were able to add content, including making their own lessons and games. Helps that it was an educational system, running on connected networks at different universities.

This is one of those features that people think they want, and would cost Netflix a ton of money, but would ultimately become filled with spam and would only have a small number of power users. It's a big money pit that does little to retain users and generate revenue. "More social" has been pitched to Spotify countless times and it would likely face a similar fate.

Netflix doesn't want to look bad when they see things on your list that are no longer available. I guess they could hide/remove them but then it looks bad to the list creator.

This has been tried ... numerous times. I recall a brief-lived CBS Interactive site / app in the late aughts. Went nowhere.

Most such interaction now occurs within extant social groups. Much as you'd watch a TV show or go to a theatre with friends, most people now discuss films on their self-centric social media. FB / Instagram / Reddit / Twitter, etc., usually with at least some people they know directly.

Conversing with absolute strangers has far less appeal.

They had this feature (sort of). I don't remember if you could recommend movies to others, but you could have friends and see each other's viewing history.

Ubik ... Safe when taken as directed.

It's just advertising, American's instagram has it too

Deepfakes will solve this

Display advertising will show you products that you have expressed an interest in today.

Streaming video has ad slots similar to traditional linear TV because it's what people are used to. There is the opportunity to do much much more.

What I could see happening is content changing to be tailored to the viewer. This would both decrease subscriber churn in the increasingly competitive streaming space, as well as add a feature to advertise via the content itself.

You like the pants? Point your remote at them to purchase with a single click. Honestly, I could see Amazon sponsoring streaming content for that purpose. AWS has streaming services and Amazon has been doing the logistics for decades.

Set up an API that allows anyone to tag videos and earn a commission in sales based on that tag. Let them figure out where it makes sense to invest the effort and how to automate it.

Spam would be a huge problem, of course.

Surely that's a job that ML would handle easily?

Oh, ugh... Memories of all the awful road metaphor headlines of the time are flooding back-- "Breaking Down on the Information Superhighway", "Traffic Jams...",

Is it as good as Generation X ? Also I'd love Coupland to reiterate and do a 'Generation Z' about zoomers and digital natives.

This makes sense. Cloud computing should be part of the Meteorology department!

Shouldn't it be linked to the agricultural department because of the phrase "Neuland"?

I recently learned that one of the major competition regulators in Germany is called the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur or BNetzA), which oversees electricity, gas, telecommunications, post, and railway markets.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Network_Agency>

Given my own relatively recent realisation that virtually all industrial monopolies can be considered (sometimes with some mental gymnastics) as networks, this is an interesting bit of confirmation.

That's amazing, I don't even care if its true.

But it can only manage policies for Layer 4 and above, right? :)

Heavy "citation needed" here.

OMG this is... quite the misunderstanding -_-'

Yes, it was a government initiative to create a decentralised network. Getting ready in 1994 was over 20 years late.

Fun fact: Queen Elizabeth sent an email in 1976. Or more likely she pressed a button.

ARPANET was basically military and educational, and was pre-web. I remember using a 300 baud acoustic coupler to dial into a university computer c.1980; there really wasn't a whole lot you could do with it back then - just simple text-based stuff like telnet (remote login) and command-line based e-mail (SMTP) as well as FTP. Even things like IRC, Usenet, Archie, Gopher all came later.

While the commercial internet, allowing companies and consumers to connect, grew out of ARPANET, it obviously was commercially funded, with backbones built out by the telecoms, etc. I think for most people today the term "internet" is essentially synonymous with "web" - stuff they can do in their browser, which of course came a lot later. HTML and HTTP were only invented c.1990, and this was the beginning of the internet as people today know it. Even then, a lot of people only saw the internet as filtered through AOL.

Not to mention BBC

If it was government controlled, it would be even less diverse. Think of the original AOL, but country wide.

It has to do with what protocol they are using to communicate with the server/cloud/whatever. If they are using HTTP/S (hyper text transfer protocol) then it is web/www. Otherwise, it is some other protocol. For example, email (technically) uses SMTP (simple message transfer protocol).

However, all of these run on top of the Internet Protocol (IP). So, everything is internet, but not everything on the internet is http.

Apps are almost certainly using HTTP under the hood to communicate with their servers, so technically they are a part of the web, which is a part of the internet.

Probably due to that provocative movie on cable TV by the same name.

It had that girl from the bus.

That is correct, there was no way to have multiple hosts on the same machine. One of the start-ups I helped build (engineer #2) in early 1997 (which still exists today in some form that many young, single men have spent quality time alone with) had a landing page, so that if your browser did not provide the host header, it would give you an index page of all the salacious sub websites/sub-domains available that you could then click on - it was an image map, naturally. We were very careful to keep the heterosexual and the homosexual offerings on physically separated servers so that customers did not complain about "accidentally" clicking on content that they didn't want to see. Latest versions of Netscape at the time supported the host header, but Internet Explorer very explicitly did not. And IE was the default for many people just getting online for the first time outside of AOL/Compuserve.

I think you’re right that it’s about virtual hosts. AFAICT the Host header first appeared in this 1997 RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2068#section-14.23

Issues with the Internet date to its origins ... and inventors. Paul Baran in the 1960s, amongst others, whom I've compiled here:

<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193>

Sources / instances date to the 1980s or earlier, addressing specifically the false assertion by many that "nobody saw this coming".

Based on past experience, it is going to look a lot like the internet of today. Things just don't move that fast that 9 years will make much of a difference.

You're in luck - here's a list of still-operative dial-up BBSes: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/bbs/connection/dial-up/list/b...

There is a device you connect to your computer port and it can emulate dial up. It connects to your wifi but your computer sees it as a modem, then you type regular AT commands and instead of a number it connects to telnet BBSs.

Tildes. https://scribe.bus-hit.me/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-...

Putting the back of your hand close enough to the screen could be a hair-raising experience ...

Oh absolutely! I guess I'm confusing my own point - which is / was that in some places cell towers are showing up -before- wireline connections.

A lot of the billions of dollars earmarked over the decades for telecom and cable companies was spent on dividends and buybacks rather than fiber rollout as intended.

Pity - I used your link and tried hunting for the Mother's Day bouquet she was looking at but it wasn't archived.

Even if it worked, ordering flowers from port 80 just wouldn't be the same.

Or, viewed another way: they played nothing but commercials (for albums, concerts, and merch)

> Dynamic websites is a core idea of the modern internet and that concept did not exist in 1994 internet.

CGI and other forms of dynamicity absolutely existed in 1994[0].

> JavaScript did not exist.

IT just needed 1 more year!

> Modern internet is also real-time and largely community driven. Even the notion of these did not exist in 1994 internet.

Check out MUDs and MOOs. Lambda was 3 years old in 1994. Wired called online virtual worlds "the addiction of the '90s[1]."

> Websockets did not exist.

But Berkeley sockets did (although you might have had to do some tinkering with Winsock on Windows!) , and I'm curious what you can do over a web socket that you can't do over a traditional socket.

> Social networks did not exist.

MUDs and mOOs again.

> Video conferencing did not exist.

Intel actually released a "kit" to enable this on regular Windows PCs in 1994. Cost a pretty penny though[2]!

>Collaborative document editing did not exist.

The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Widely available implementations of the concept took decades to appear. A piece of software called Instant Update was released for the classic Mac OS in 1991 from ON Technology[3].

> The ideas of wearables and always connected devices (smart watches, speakers, thermostats, lights, etc) did not exist in 1994.

Proto wearables absolutely existed in 1994[4].

X10 was developed in 1975 by Pico Electronics of Glenrothes, Scotland, in order to allow remote control of home devices and appliances. It was pretty cool, too, the modules had big honkin relays in them and would go 'clonk' when you switched them!

> The idea that you could create virtual worlds, ie a metaverse, where anyone and everyone could interact by talking and even manipulating objects in the virtual world did not exist in 1994.

Seriously though, check out what LambdaMOO and similar things were[5][6].

> The idea of aggregating user behavior across every connected device they use, site they visit, physical location they visit, and generating a prediction of their likes/dislikes and future behavior in order to tailor the actual user experience to each individual (targeted advertising, your personal google search results, etc) is a mind blowing core idea of the modern internet which did not exist in 1994.

Now this, you're right about. Personally I could 1000% do without.

[0]: 1993: CGI Scripts and Early Server-Side Web Programming. https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1993-cgi-scripts-and-early...

[1]: Johnny Manhattan Meets the Furry Muckers. https://www.wired.com/1994/03/muds-3/

[2]: Intel to Unveil Kit for Video Conferencing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1994/01/25/i...

[3]: Collaborative real-time editor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_real-time_editor

[4]: The 1994 Smartwatch That Syncs with a CRT. https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/03/16/the-1994-smartwatch-tha...

[5]: Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1083-6101...

[6]: Fly Me To the MOO: Adventures in Textual Reality. http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9405/moo.html

Blame the industry for doing so much tracking and at the same time not developing an industry standard for automating user consent decisions.

I think it would have more to do with Fiber to the Node allowing ISPs to only half-upgrade their infrastructure and still achieve workable broadband, even if having the foresight to do straight fiber would have been a much better goal to work towards at the time.