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Around 1990-92, people stopped saying "we have a connection to the internet backbone" and started saying "we have a connection to the internet". By 1994 we had
by dsr_ 7y ago
Around 1990-92, people stopped saying "we have a connection to the internet backbone" and started saying "we have a connection to the internet".
By 1994 we had the concept of a "regional ISP" versus a
"Tier 1 ISP", where the difference was economic and political: a Tier 1 had settlement-free interconnections at major exchanges, because a sufficient percentage of connectors considered them valuable enough as traffic sources/sinks as to be "peers" rather than clients.
- karmakaze 7y agoWe also stopped calling it the Internet and to just internet somewhere along the line.
- ghaff 7y agoWe still say "the internet" a lot of the time. The capitalization thing is pretty common with new technologies at least in English. See e.g. Big Data, Open Source, etc. We treat them like proper nouns at first and then, once they become commonplace, we drop the caps because it looks a bit silly to have random capital letters all over the place. Mostly, it's a reminder that we should use caps in this way judiciously for new stuff.
- ghaff 7y agoA lot of the bigger/commercial BBSs became ISPs when the internet started to get more prominent. Of course, this changed when broadband arrived.