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The women who coined the expression 'surfing the internet' (2019)
- pattisapu 3y ago"The Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy” made me think of Vint Cerf. :)
- blipvert 3y agoMaybe it WAS Cerfing the Internet, but no one caught on , because homophones.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoWe didn't "Surf the Internet", we surfed the Information Superhighway. Before that we "browsed" like ruminants, consuming slowly with very strong stomachs, and sometimes regurgitating. Then we got caught in the "Web". Time's fun when you're having flies, as the spider joked.
- diggan 3y ago> We didn't "Surf the Internet", we surfed the Information Superhighway For many of us, it was more like the "Information Country Road" with the speeds we had. I don't think I had ADSL access until 2006/2007 sometime, then it actually felt like a super highway. But before that, "paddling the Internet" would have been more accurate.
- IggleSniggle 3y agoYeah but you could get information from anywhere and if you grew up traveling on the Interstate system, it still felt like you could be "instantly" transported to a piece of knowledge. It was still hecka faster than getting to your local library, browsing through the card catalog, and only then looking something up in an index (at the back of a book), if your library even had it. Of course, we weren't on there for the books, but for the people. Even at 1200 baud you could be more or less instantly transported to university systems all across the country.
- count 3y agoMost superhighways move at 1-5mph due to traffic congestion... so it's still valid :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Solvency 3y ago"The future is now. Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone, and computer. You'll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, and watch female mud wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam. There's no end to the possibilities." — Chip Douglas, The Cable Guy
- dalmo3 3y ago> or play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam. There's no end to the possibilities. Well, sadly, that very example is impossible in practical terms.
- chongli 3y agoWhy, is Mortal Kombat banned in Vietnam?
- dalmo3 3y agoI was thinking in terms of MK being a reflex-based game and the physical reality of latency. Of course the assumption being that the author of the quote was somewhere far away from Vietnam.
- chongli 3y agoModern netcode can hide a lot of this latency. You can definitely play with someone far away, though the experience won't be as consistent and reliable is with someone nearby. But things are always improving! Most of the issue is with jitter, not latency. If you had a dedicated point-to-point link to your friend in Vietnam you could play a flawless game of Mortal Kombat for sure!
- jasode 3y ago>We didn't "Surf the Internet", we surfed the Information Superhighway. The meme "surf the internet" gained wide currency pretty much immediately. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Surf+the+Internet&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Surf+the+Inter... And a 1994 book title used it: https://www.amazon.com/Surf-Internet-Bundle-Neil-Randall/dp/0672304252/ https://www.amazon.com/Surf-Internet-Bundle-Neil-Randall/dp/...
- Lammy 3y agoWe used to be “Navigating” and “Exploring”, implying deep water and unknown riches on the other side. It’s pretty apt then how “surfing” implies shallow waters in a static location where the “””content””” comes to you.
- nunez 3y agoI'll still sometimes say "navigate to <url>" out of habit
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justin66 3y agoI don't think I ever witnessed anyone use the term "information superhighway" for any purpose other than mockery of the term "information superhighway."
- nonrandomstring 3y agoNever. Like one badly advised politician on TV, once ever! And maybe Fred Dinenage on the Computer Programme, or something [0,1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme [1] https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/a-brave-new-world-the-1980s-home-computer-boom/ https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/a-brave-new...
- justin66 3y agoBy "witnessed" I meant in person. By "mockery" I meant mockery of politicians and cluesless media personalities. I mean, who talks like that? (I did have one especially goofy friend once confide in me that he had been "surfing the nets")
- blipvert 3y agoFred Harris, surely?
- nonrandomstring 3y agoDamnit, Fred Harris, of course. Thanks. Old mind plays tricks. Also I found a sweet "Micro Live" episode (Ian McNaught-Davis and Lesley Judd), but no mention of the "superhighway".
- ClassyJacket 3y agoIt must be an American thing because I only remember hearing it in one episode of The Simpsons. Can you imagine if it was the normal term? "I must remember to get my information superhighway connected as soon as I move into my new apartment!" "Hey is your information superhighway dropping out? Mine is." "Did you hear Jenna had her pictures leaked on the information superhighway?"
- milesvp 3y ago"I wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well." I miss how fun the internet used to be. There is something lost with the current torrent of entertainment that is readily fed through popularity based algorithms. Hacker news is about as close as I get to that feeling, but it’s not the same since it’s completely hub and spoke. Youtube can come close in a similar way, if you stay away from shorts. But, what I really miss, is how often I found myself falling off the web into other places on the internet. gopher and telnet and archie. There were these other places to explore, and because the net was so much smaller it made sense to explore. FWIW, I’ve had a similar sensation playing on a shared minecraft server recently, the stuff people build is so varying and interesting.
- munk-a 3y agoI'd argue that the internet today actually requires more skill to use than it did back in the day - it's difficult to avoid the content blackholes that exist and, if you're truly masochistic, you could try the "Browse through twenty site links without ever submitting a request to facebook.com" challenge - assuming you're not using an ad/domain blocker (which you should be). There are a lot of extremely niche things on the internet still and I agree that Youtube (and Nebula!) are where they mostly reside. Sadly gone are the days when just typing up some rudimentary HTML would qualify as engaging content to most people... I met my wife on a MUD - but now you need webcams, editors and production value to make content.
- bookofjoe 3y agoNot true: I've been publishing posts on my blog multiple times daily for almost 20 years without a webcam, editor, or production value.
- ryandrake 3y agoEven "I'm Feeling Lucky" was interesting long ago. Back then, the median website was pretty interesting, and you had a pretty good chance of finding something great randomly. Now, it just sends you to canned, boring product SERP pages and Wikipedia pages. If you actually had an interface that pointed you to a uniformly random web site, you're mostly going to get SEO spam and machine-generated content.
- causi 3y agoThe submission title is wrong. The title of the article is The women who coined the expression 'Surfing the Internet' not "woman", reflecting the two people the article discusses.
- dang 3y agoWhoa good catch. Fixed now. Thanks!
- phendrenad2 3y agoOkay now we need to track down that "information surfer" mousepad and figure out who designed it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stordoff 3y agoSomeone appears to have done that: > The mouse pad was designed by Steve Cisler, who had been hired at the Apple Library as librarian. However, Apple thought the title librarian was too boring and so named him an Information Surfer. http://forage.ward.fed.wiki.org/view/information-surfer http://forage.ward.fed.wiki.org/view/information-surfer
- dang 3y agohttps://gutenberg.org/ebooks/49 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/49
- commieneko 3y agoThe term Channel Surfing predates all this by at least a decade. I first heard the term in the early '80, about the time when cable systems starting becoming the norm. It's not too much a stretch to go from channel surfing to internet surfing. Similar phrases that were, as it were, in the water at the time: bar surfing, bedroom surfing, boy/girl surfing. I suspect a lot of these usages were regional, I know "bedroom surfing" was something I heard while living in Los Angeles. But "bar surfing" (and bar hopping) was common in the south as well. Not trying to take anything away from anyone who first published the internet variations of this. But it was a thing before the internet.
- commieneko 3y agoCome to think of it, cable surfing was also something that I remember.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gweinberg 3y agoYeah, I had always assumed "surfing the internet" just grew out of "channel surfing".
- iisan7 3y agoAnd couch surfing, which OED found a citation for from 1987. Still, applying it in a new context is worth something.
- nunez 3y agowow, didn't know that couch surfing was that old.
- eggoa 3y agoIn the library of my high school, circa 1995, there were a couple computers for student use. There was a sign near them saying "No Surfing".
- RankingMember 3y ago"Bess can't go there"
- kirse 3y agoWhat a throwback. Used to run cgi-proxy to tiptoe around ol' Bessie.
- derwiki 3y agoBess blocked sites about evolution I tried to visit when I was preparing for a biology class debate. Luckily, the local ISP’s proxy was dead simple to configure in Netscape 4 and got around Bess.
- doubled112 3y agoI wonder how many kids got their start learning to get around that thing. It wasn't very good at what it did.
- wolpoli 3y agoWe don't surf the internet anymore. We now scroll social media.
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- newsclues 3y ago[flagged]
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- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoAs a teen in the 90's, I remember the first time I heard someone use the terms "surfing the internet", "surfing the web", "information superhighway", "cyber-anything"... I can assure you the terms were as cringe back then as they are today. I half-suspect the desperate attempts by the media to make it sound hip to boomers may well have set adoption back years.
- bowsamic 3y agoI was a teen in the 2000s and in my cultural sphere they weren't considered cringey at all (in fact, in 2000s UK we didn't really have a concept of cringe like we have today)
- timthorn 3y ago> we didn't really have a concept of cringe like we have today We didn't use the word in the same syntactical manner - things make you cringe, or are cringeworthty - but I can assure you that my very British mother was using the word properly to refer to the same kind of things back then. (And as a UK teen back then... yes, I cringed at the term!)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spacechild1 3y agoI'm also a kid of the 90s and I still use it :) At least in German, "im Internet surfen" has always been a completely normal expression for, well, surfing the internet. What would the hip people use instead?
- qup 3y ago"Hip" people don't surf the Internet, not really. They would say "I'm on insta"
- spacechild1 3y ago
- Upvoter33 3y agopretty silly to credit someone for "surfing the web" when surfing was already used in the context of TVs, etc.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- __lbracket__ 3y agoDon't you undermine this momentous achievement you toxic patriarch ! /s
- mtmail 3y agoAt Yahoo! the department that maintained the directory of websites was called 'surfing' and the employees were 'surfers'. Their full-time job was to add summaries and categorize new websites. And who could forget the huge project of extending the 10 top level categories to 16?
- octopusRex 3y agoI remember calling up yahoo on the phone and arguing that weddings should get its own category. We had a wedding website and it was lost under "Business". Yes, we called and talked to someone on the PHONE at Yahoo. No, we did not get a separate category.
- xrd 3y agoI'm surprised the .surf TLD is not more popular. It's only $20 on Cloudflare and a few others.
- willcipriano 3y agoDoes it jack up after a few years? A lot of the lower priced ones do that. $20 year one, $2000 year 3.
- xrd 3y agoRenewals appear to be only $20 or so.
- goykasi 3y agoCloudflare has no markup or fee [0]. > You pay what we pay — you won’t find better value. [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
- willcipriano 3y agoAhh, cloudflare doesn't appear to support these "premium" domains. https://community.cloudflare.com/t/can-i-tranfer-a-premium-domain-to-cloudflare/577639 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/can-i-tranfer-a-premium-d...
- lindner 3y agoIt's interesting that this article didn't mention Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota. Jean Amour Polly would have definitely known about it, as back then the Gopher Team was all about creating Digital Libraries. And Mark McCahill was a ardent Windsurfer, which resulted in this shirt, designed by his partner Wendy Jedeckila, way back in 1991! https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102747784 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10274778...
- incompatible 3y agoIf you look up her guide on project Gutenberg, there are references to Gopher. It's nostalgic to see "WorldWideWeb" getting a brief mention as as another service that you can try out. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49
- nerdingaround 3y agoNifty little article and comments. Who know some many people used the term "surfing the internet" back then?
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoThe Adventures of Captain Internet And CERF Boy, October 1991. "The LAN that time forgot" https://archive.org/details/CaptainInternetAndCERFBoyNumber1October1991 https://archive.org/details/CaptainInternetAndCERFBoyNumber1...
- NoPicklez 3y agoIt's a good name, to me it's similar to "browsing the internet". Which in my mind is just "looking" around on the internet without necessarily contributing as such, like posting on blogs, playing names, sending emails etc. Browsing the internet like just browsing in a store. I guess we use Browsers to Browse the internet.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoSurfing the web. "Surfing the internet" would probably be considered "unauthorised scanning" by someone.
- Findecanor 3y agoIn the mid-90's when I first got on the Web, I encountered one or two web sites that did have a quite hostile message in its "HTTP 404 Not Found" page: "Your Illegal Access Has Been Logged!"
- AlienRobot 3y agoThe article is very interesting but am I the only one that feels weirded out by how articles like these are published on the web? There's no author information besides "Editor at SurferToday" in the HTML metadata. I understand that some people may wish to publish anonymously, but I think if you used a pseudonym like John Surfer it would at least feel like an actual person wrote it in our current era of AI-generated articles. There's no date of publication. Of course the page itself may change with any CSS/template change and one of the great things of URLs is that you can modify the article with more recent information, still, having a date is kind of important. There is no attribution. So is this an article of someone who interviewed her personally or is it a transcription of the video? The video is not by Surfer Today, it's from a channel called "Imagining the Digital Future Center" with 900 subscribers, but the actual brand on the video is called Internet Hall of Fame. I've seen so many articles like this and it always feels so strange to me for some reason.
- octopusRex 3y agoI think most of us called it "going down a rabbit hole."