6 ms·

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

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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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

bsaul 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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