3 ms·

Oh from the title I was expecting the inverse -- the first time someone in popular media mentioned the internet in some way. I still remember the first time I

Oh from the title I was expecting the inverse -- the first time someone in popular media mentioned the internet in some way. I still remember the first time I heard _modem sounds_ in a radio ad spot. I about fell out of my chair. Why would someone advertise that? Only like 0.0001% of the listenership would know what that sound means! Oh wait.... are there more people who'd recognize that now? Hmm, I guess that might be the case. Whoah. Some advertiser, whose job is to know these things, believes a commercially significant fraction of listeners would know that. WHOAH. What is happening??? The idea that modems and computers were going mainstream, was a paradigm shift I think other folks must've experienced but we don't seem to talk much about. Anyone under about age 35 I figure has always known the internet as a popular thing, and I don't know if it's possible to convey how huge a transformation that was for us older folks who lived through it. Imagine a talkshow guest just casually mentioning their fursona like it's no big deal and the host just responds by talking about theirs like of course this is something everyone does. That's the level of shock and confusion. But it's bigger than that. This wasn't just a hobby, I mean it was a hobby, but it's one that everyone involved understood would change the world if it went mainstream. Of course that would never happen...

mbustamanter 5y ago
Interesting, In what year did this happen? I wonder if it's related to the Eternal September.
- myself248 5y ago
  Oh now that's a good question. I'm thinking 1994, because of which radio station I was listening to and I wasn't sick of them yet... Now I wish I had a written note of it.
  - mocheeze 5y ago
    That sounds about right. Similar time to when I was seeing TV shows talk about to to reach them on CompuServe, AOL, then just straight up WWW websites. I especially remember my dad saying, "Well, it's definitely happening now if we're getting .com domains on regular TV ads." (He was using ARPANET as a teenager before going on to Stanford for EE and Physics, so he'd been following it for a while, haha.)
fortran77 5y ago
The popular media covered home computers quite bit during the early years (late 70s), and dozens of books were published by TAB, McGraw Hill, etc, with BASIC program listings, etc. I remember listening to WBAI late summer in 1977 and hearing Nat Broizman call in to some late night radio show and relayed the audio of his TRS-80 playing the theme from the "William Tell Overture" with radio signals induced into a nearby radio receiver. The following week, WBAI was actually broadcasting TRS-80 cassette software over the air! This was the first exposure to a home computer I ever had. I was able to track down Nat via phone phreak connections and got to play with the TRS-80 soon after. I got myself a Commodore PET and then an Apple ][. The Phone Phreaks were quick to use computers to generate tones and to auto-dial.

mbustamanter 5y ago

Interesting, In what year did this happen? I wonder if it's related to the Eternal September.

myself248 5y ago
Oh now that's a good question. I'm thinking 1994, because of which radio station I was listening to and I wasn't sick of them yet... Now I wish I had a written note of it.
- mocheeze 5y ago
  That sounds about right. Similar time to when I was seeing TV shows talk about to to reach them on CompuServe, AOL, then just straight up WWW websites. I especially remember my dad saying, "Well, it's definitely happening now if we're getting .com domains on regular TV ads." (He was using ARPANET as a teenager before going on to Stanford for EE and Physics, so he'd been following it for a while, haha.)

fortran77 5y ago

The popular media covered home computers quite bit during the early years (late 70s), and dozens of books were published by TAB, McGraw Hill, etc, with BASIC program listings, etc. I remember listening to WBAI late summer in 1977 and hearing Nat Broizman call in to some late night radio show and relayed the audio of his TRS-80 playing the theme from the "William Tell Overture" with radio signals induced into a nearby radio receiver. The following week, WBAI was actually broadcasting TRS-80 cassette software over the air! This was the first exposure to a home computer I ever had. I was able to track down Nat via phone phreak connections and got to play with the TRS-80 soon after. I got myself a Commodore PET and then an Apple ][. The Phone Phreaks were quick to use computers to generate tones and to auto-dial.