Was it just the realities of money, that an end user would rather pay a tiny fraction of the real cost of being truly on line and pay instead with their freedom?
We used to laugh at AOLers because they weren't experiencing the real internet, because they sold themselves out to an online service.
Are today's ISPs with their filtering and port blocking and packet shaping, really any better?
Whining about the "good ole days" when .000001% of the population had even heard of the internet and it was reserved, at great cost, to academics and researchers, is just pathetic.
And why is that a good thing in itself? Easy access to anybody else?
Ever stopped to think what kind of other side-effects that ability could have?
All controlled by about 5 corporations at the top.
It's not lost in any real sense, you just have a romanticised picture of "the good old days". Look up the the term BOFH for a reality-check.
A dial-up ISP would be oversubscribed and thus effectively throttled, just like today. Downloading too much on your university account, especially in peak hour, would get you banned.
If you want total freedom, then as now, you are free to buy a dedicated line - and they are much, much cheaper today.
Money came into the picture. And I'd say we're in worse shape now since even in the AOL days, you would still know that this isn't the real "internet". Now, we've been lulled in the false sense that we're getting unfiltered (un-throttled) access, when in fact, it's just a carefully crafted image.
I look forward to the day "Internet Service Provider" has been completely replaced with "Ubiquitous Wireless Mesh".
You have it completely backwards.
I "discovered" the Internet in 1988 when I got a job in the IT department of the University I attended. I LOVED it. I transferred files, participated a lot in news groups, played MUDs, made friends in Europe... it was wonderful.
When I graduated a few years later, I had to kiss the Internet goodbye. Without attending a major University that poured tons of money into maintaining a connection to the Internet, I had no hope of staying on it. I remember telling my parents about this amazing network of computers and saying something to the effect of, "It's fantastic, but I don't see how most people will ever get to use it because it's so expensive." Afterall, the Internet had been in existence for decades but was completely unavailable to home users.
Then they opened the Internet up for commercial use and the web came along. MONEY CAME INTO THE PICTURE. Tons of it. A few years later, every business felt like it had to be on the Internet in some way. With all that money flowing into web sites and interconnects, access from home became dirt cheap.
Commercialization is what made the Internet available for the masses. It amazes me that here we are not even twenty years later and people are rewriting history, demonizing the very framework that made the Internet successful.
The Internet of the 90s wasn't as widespread, but it had a much greater impact on areas of life and people it touched.
If anything, your list shows how centralized the Internet has become. After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.
We lost because of the great masses, the eternal october but on a much major scale. The same people that still watch TV and who become numb from their everyday medium to low-wage work, all those who are fighting against each other to climb the ladder just a tiny amount up.
See the original internet users were scientists, officers, business people, those early adopters who have the resources and curiosity to use and shape it it.
Todays internet user is any modern slave whos interests dont stretch out further than facebook and easy entertainment. Most people dont even have a concept of what the internet is. They just kind of randomly click buttons and call their laptops "plaything".
Ive seen people pay for 4G but their modem only by default runs on 3G. Meh.
Did you ever hang out in a computer lab full of people busily attaining a PhD in muds? There were a hell of a lot of people who used the net as a toy, even back in the text-only days.
Wow, the prediction is a decade off... but 100% correct for those who live in the developed world!
It's funny, because EXACTLY the same could be said right now about cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and Distributed Anonymous Corporations (DACs). The rapid rise of Bitcoin being just the tip of the iceberg.
- Productivity of a single worker: Izya, a mechanical engineering friend, used to spend hours in the engineering library trying to find the right part among hundreds of component catalogs. He now spends about 10 minutes browsing the web, on his smart phone, during lunch, at the local sandwich shop.
- Scale of an enterprise: Wal-Mart, Amazon and all companies of similar scale are effectively IT companies. What they actually sell is simply a side-effect of their IT operations. It is mind boggling to try to imagine the infrastructure and logistics involved in selling $1,300,000,000 worth of consumer goods per day.
- Return on Investment: Even the oil barons would be green with envy at an Instagram, or Twitter or Facebook and the absurdly low amount up front capital paid in to establish these business.
The Internet has changed everything. All of us, from governments to CEOs to grandmothers will spend our lives running to keep up with it.
I mean WOW! Americans were able to get internet at 40$ / month in '93? I recall, in 2003, my folks had to pay huge telephone bills even when my internet usage didn't exceed more than 2 hrs a day (dial-up times).
Then "freeserve" came out[1] and (gasp!) was free apart from the phone call. This was a major shift. There were downsides (only 1 pop3 email account, no newsgroups, no webspace), but it was free!
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herz...
Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet...
And this one:
Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness...
Notice how www/web isn't mentioned? It existed, but even when the first graphical browser came out (that same year), it wasn't clear what the point was - like many, I was on a 2400 Baud modem so every picture or graphic on a page would take 5 - 10 minutes to "come down the wire".
Ah. That changed.
Understatement of the century.
> During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
He was referring to the many initiatives he sponsored and promoted during his time as a U.S. Senator that made the internet as we know it possible. In response to the ridicule that followed the out-of-context quote "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," no less than Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
These days sites like Xvideos, Pornhub etc are monsters when it comes to bandwidth consumption, and there are dozens of major streaming porn sites.
That constant bandwidth demand has been a great catalyst in terms of encouraging ever faster speeds.
How much content is on sites like YouTube or Dailymotion related to sex appeal?
Facebook had intentionally built-in sex appeal aspects to it. It was for college students after all.
Snapchat? Chat roulette? MyFreeCams & Live Jasmin (both of which generate tens of millions in sales)? There are many porn related sites in the top 1,000 global sites. Titillation moves things forward and always will. Humans are sexual beings.
