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This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987. EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about th
by mattl 5y ago
This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987.
EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.
- post-it 5y agoSure, but pre-"everyone is online always". Even things that happened in 2005, at the start of Reddit and Digg and well into the reign of MySpace, weren't summarized and consolidated as efficiently as they are today.
- mattl 5y agoSure. But we don't describe pre-smartphone as pre-telephone.
- steviedotboston 5y agoyeah i dont see whats so hard about speaking accurately.
- notreallyserio 5y agoThis is funnier than it should be.
- PostThisTooFast 5y agoSo what's your suggestion? Instead of "pre-Internet," we're supposed to say "pre-widely-available Internet?" Yeah good luck with that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- h2odragon 5y agoBBS was the thing then. Compuserve and such. Talker BBS chat boards run on "OMG WTF is that" stacks of C64 hardware (look up "commodore 64 1Megabyte RAM") or gronkulicious clusters of RBBS hosts. There were UUCP gateways to netnews an mail built out of ignorance and Qbasic by some insane hacker but that was bout as deep as "internet" penetrated. "Joliet One" had a 3b2 but they were pretty restrictive with their feeds.
- mattl 5y agoI mean, some people were using BBS but there are academics and others using the internet.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoI had a C64 and my mom bought me a CompuServe starter kit at some point in the 80's. I think it was something like $6 an hour off-peak and over $20 an hour during peak hours, which might not even include long distance charges depending on where you were. That would be $20 an hour off-peak and over $60 peak in today's dollars. For 300 bits per second. For practical purposes, the internet did not exist for people like me until the mid-90's.
- mattl 5y agoFor practical purposes smartphones don't exist for a lot of people today, but we're not saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoIf a smartphone cost a dollar a minute to use, we would be saying we're in the pre-smartphone era. Edit: sorry, per minute, not per hour.
- mattl 5y agoI'm sure there are places in the world where a smartphone basically costs way more than that. Just because your access was a dollar an hour, does not mean it didn't exist.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoUniversity access.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoMy mom worked at a university when she bought me the C64 and the starter kit. Towards the end of this period, I was going to university. We did not have that type of access.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoThe internet effectively did not exist in 1987. Even the most tech savvy people didn’t have access. That didn’t start to change until the early 90’s. Al Gore’s contribution was actually important.
- mattl 5y agoPublic access starts in the late 80s with things like The World and Netcom, but people were posting on the Internet in the 1980s. There's http://olduse.net http://olduse.net where you can go and read old USENET posts from the era.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoRight. And I had access to it at my university in 1988.
- caymanjim 5y agoThe popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the 70s and 80s, and into the very early 90s, when he was one of the first politicians to embrace and push legislation for it. He was definitely influential in its adoption and proliferation, insofar as politicians are important in funding all these things, and acting as evangelists. There's a pretty good Wikipedia article[1] about it all. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
- mattl 5y agoOf Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that, > As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983.
- FredPret 5y agoI think the internet era is generally taken to be from 1995 on
- mattl 5y agoThat’s the rise of the web though. 1995 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start shipping with browsers preinstalled.
- FredPret 5y agoIt’s not much of an internet without mass participation though
- notakio 5y agoAs someone who was online in 1987, I've found the internet significantly less enjoyable as it has become filled with "regular people", hoping to share the knowledge they don't have with people who didn't ask for it in the first place. While I get what you're saying, there was also a time and place where you could wonder aloud how to do $technical_thing_x on $platform_y and get a knowledgable, competent response from a skilled professional who had done that thing. Now, we sift through thousands of pages of sloppy copy pasta, of unknown pedigree and unknown efficacy. Was that for the best?
- pomian 5y agoor go to HN, and ask.
- ohyes 5y agodon't ask, simply answer the question you have wrong.
- FredPret 5y agoThe bulk of humanity have been endowed with sci-fi superpowers thanks to Wikipedia, Google, Google Maps, remote work, shopping from home, etc. As for the nerds who lost their online paradise? They are now in insane demand, earning eye-watering salaries and company valuations, and rising to the top of the social ladder. It’s not perfect, but it is bloody good.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoWikipedia: > Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.