3 ms·

in 1995 people understood very well what internet was going to become. The technology just wasn't there yet, but every kid and parents remember very well the so

by bsaul 3y ago

in 1995 people understood very well what internet was going to become. The technology just wasn't there yet, but every kid and parents remember very well the sound of that modem and the phone lines beeing busy. That memo would have been prescient if made 5 years before.

deleted 3y ago
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adalacelove 3y ago
True but the remaining of the comment is still valid: Microsoft had time in advance to prepare. But just "internet" doesn't mean a lot. Prescient would have been predicting search, ads and social media. We now are in a similar position maybe, with some tech that looks cool, trying to build geocities with AI
mads_ravn 3y ago
Yeah, I also thought of Eternal September [1] in 1993, when I saw the claim to prescience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- bsaul 3y ago
  Absolutely. I just looked back at netscape wikipedia page, and it was already out in 1995 and distributed freely. Internet explorer was out in 1995 as well. Barely underground stuff. And that's just for the www. People were using BBS, FTP, email and newsgroup before that.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
The infamous Bill Gates and David Letterman interview was in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y Lots of people definitely didn't understand what a big deal it was going to be then. In October 1994 a Wired journalist registered mcdonalds.com and then tried to give it to Mcdonalds, but couldn't reach anyone who understood the importance of domain name registration: https://archive.is/tHaea https://archive.is/tHaea In my recollection it really wasn't til 1998-2001 or so that people (where I lived in the southern U.S. anyway) really started to take notice.
- bsaul 3y ago
  I passed my high school exam in 1996, in france, and a friend of mine who had internet gave me the topic for the history exam a day before. His parents weren’t comp-science researcher, he just liked tech, and « had internet ». it was already popular amongst the general public. On the other side, my mother once worked in a comp science research department, and she once brought me to the lab, where people would create me an email. That was something around 1990. She told me « they’re all crazy with that internet thing ». i never used that email, i didn’t even understand what that was, pretty much nobody in the general audience did. Being able to predict that it would be big at that time maybe would have been prescient, although it was already the consensus amongst people in the field.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    > it was already popular amongst the general public. No it wasn’t, not by the normal definition of “popular”. It was less than 1% of the population. https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
    - poulpy123 3y ago
      in 1994-1995 in france, internet was starting to be known from the general public and available to anyone. It was already dubbed as the future in the medias
    - bsaul 3y ago
      people talked about it, people knew about it, some non-tech people already were using it. That's what i meant by "popular" (sorry, non-native, so maybe it isn't the correct word). What i mean is that it wasn't some bleeding edge tech only a few people in the elite knew about. Everybody already knew that was the future.
    - pfsalter 3y ago
      Could be talking about Mintel [0] which was a simpler, earlier version of the web [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
greedo 3y ago
You're conflating the Internet with the walled gardens that were dominant at the time; AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy etc.
- hollerith 3y ago
  You're off by about 4 years: by 1995, the number of Internet users was many times higher than users of all other networks of computers combined. There were million of AOL customers in 1995, but most of them used AOL only to access web sites on the internet and send and receive SMTP email. Getting back to the original topic, by 1995 there were hundreds of mainstream journalists who where predicting in their published output that the internet will quickly become an important part of society. It was the standard opinion among those that had an opinion on the topic.
  - bradknowles 3y ago
    I worked at AOL in 1995. We had three million users at that point, and we had recently upgraded to a live Internet e-mail gateway system. I was the first Internet mail operations person ever hired by AOL. My job on my first day was to install the fourth inbound mail gateway system. By 1996, we were up to five million users, and Steve Case gave everyone in the company a special company jacket as a bonus. I still have mine, although it hasn't fit me in a couple of decades. Even as late as 1997 (when I left), most AOL users were still in the "walled garden". Sure, we were the biggest Internet e-mail provider in the world, but that was still just a small fraction of the total AOL users. AIM was much more popular than e-mail. Advances were being made in efficiently distributing AIM chat messages efficiently that would not be exceeded in the outside world until the advent of BitTorrent. However, by 1997, I think we did have more users coming into AOL over the Internet and their local ISP, as opposed to through our own modem banks. That was in part due to the "unlimited" plans that AOL rolled out, but the telephone calls themselves would have to be paid for if the user dialed non-local POPs for our modem banks, and many of our modem banks were totally overloaded. AOL's big "hockey stick" moment was in 1995, sure. But the "hockey stick" moment for the Internet was at least a year or two later.
  - greedo 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by bsaul 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

adalacelove 3y ago

True but the remaining of the comment is still valid: Microsoft had time in advance to prepare. But just "internet" doesn't mean a lot. Prescient would have been predicting search, ads and social media. We now are in a similar position maybe, with some tech that looks cool, trying to build geocities with AI

mads_ravn 3y ago

Yeah, I also thought of Eternal September [1] in 1993, when I saw the claim to prescience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

bsaul 3y ago
Absolutely. I just looked back at netscape wikipedia page, and it was already out in 1995 and distributed freely. Internet explorer was out in 1995 as well. Barely underground stuff. And that's just for the www. People were using BBS, FTP, email and newsgroup before that.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

The infamous Bill Gates and David Letterman interview was in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y Lots of people definitely didn't understand what a big deal it was going to be then. In October 1994 a Wired journalist registered mcdonalds.com and then tried to give it to Mcdonalds, but couldn't reach anyone who understood the importance of domain name registration: https://archive.is/tHaea https://archive.is/tHaea In my recollection it really wasn't til 1998-2001 or so that people (where I lived in the southern U.S. anyway) really started to take notice.

bsaul 3y ago
I passed my high school exam in 1996, in france, and a friend of mine who had internet gave me the topic for the history exam a day before. His parents weren’t comp-science researcher, he just liked tech, and « had internet ». it was already popular amongst the general public. On the other side, my mother once worked in a comp science research department, and she once brought me to the lab, where people would create me an email. That was something around 1990. She told me « they’re all crazy with that internet thing ». i never used that email, i didn’t even understand what that was, pretty much nobody in the general audience did. Being able to predict that it would be big at that time maybe would have been prescient, although it was already the consensus amongst people in the field.
- kortilla 3y ago
  > it was already popular amongst the general public. No it wasn’t, not by the normal definition of “popular”. It was less than 1% of the population. https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
  - poulpy123 3y ago
    in 1994-1995 in france, internet was starting to be known from the general public and available to anyone. It was already dubbed as the future in the medias
  - bsaul 3y ago
    people talked about it, people knew about it, some non-tech people already were using it. That's what i meant by "popular" (sorry, non-native, so maybe it isn't the correct word). What i mean is that it wasn't some bleeding edge tech only a few people in the elite knew about. Everybody already knew that was the future.
  - pfsalter 3y ago
    Could be talking about Mintel [0] which was a simpler, earlier version of the web [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

greedo 3y ago

You're conflating the Internet with the walled gardens that were dominant at the time; AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy etc.

hollerith 3y ago
You're off by about 4 years: by 1995, the number of Internet users was many times higher than users of all other networks of computers combined. There were million of AOL customers in 1995, but most of them used AOL only to access web sites on the internet and send and receive SMTP email. Getting back to the original topic, by 1995 there were hundreds of mainstream journalists who where predicting in their published output that the internet will quickly become an important part of society. It was the standard opinion among those that had an opinion on the topic.
- bradknowles 3y ago
  I worked at AOL in 1995. We had three million users at that point, and we had recently upgraded to a live Internet e-mail gateway system. I was the first Internet mail operations person ever hired by AOL. My job on my first day was to install the fourth inbound mail gateway system. By 1996, we were up to five million users, and Steve Case gave everyone in the company a special company jacket as a bonus. I still have mine, although it hasn't fit me in a couple of decades. Even as late as 1997 (when I left), most AOL users were still in the "walled garden". Sure, we were the biggest Internet e-mail provider in the world, but that was still just a small fraction of the total AOL users. AIM was much more popular than e-mail. Advances were being made in efficiently distributing AIM chat messages efficiently that would not be exceeded in the outside world until the advent of BitTorrent. However, by 1997, I think we did have more users coming into AOL over the Internet and their local ISP, as opposed to through our own modem banks. That was in part due to the "unlimited" plans that AOL rolled out, but the telephone calls themselves would have to be paid for if the user dialed non-local POPs for our modem banks, and many of our modem banks were totally overloaded. AOL's big "hockey stick" moment was in 1995, sure. But the "hockey stick" moment for the Internet was at least a year or two later.
- greedo 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]