Ten. 10. a. 1010. 12. X.
yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away/
now armadillos eat my larvae - the beetles
Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web
Good article, interesting reading. Hard to believe it's been just ten years. If you weren't in elementary school (no offense, honest!) when you first heard the name Netscape, what did it mean to you? Anything?
Ten years ago these "places" (and in most cases the companies behind them) did not exist: Google. Yahoo! MSN. Blogger, obviously. There's lots more of course but I'm drawing a blank trying to think of some.
Dateline: summer, 1995. Microsoft's Bill Gates watched Windows 95 replace MS-DOS, and no doubt smiled as IBM's technically superior competing product (OS/2) withered and died.
AOL and Time Warner were separate companies. Oh wait, is that true again? No matter. Back then AOL - free! for 30 days! - had (1) a bad reputation, (2) slow, expensive service, (3) clueless users, and (4) token competition from Prodigy and Compuserve. What's that saying, the more things change...? User cluelessness is down, I suppose.
Internet Explorer? No such thing. Computer viruses existed but were relatively uncommon and hard to get. Trojan - that's a condom, right? Worms? Fishing lures. Spyware and adware weren't even words, though "spam" meant more than canned ham even then.
No DVD drives, MP3s, iPods, or X-Box. No Half-Life, standalone or multiplayer. Online games yes, but - well. The words limited and (comparatively) lame come to mind.
Thinking about this "wonderful" stuff makes me wonder: when did you start using the internet, and why (i.e. for what purpose(s))?
Hard to imagine the next ten years bringing an equal amount or "degree" of change. What do you think?
Friday update: OS/2 is now "officially" dead. Long live OS/2.
spotted on /.
now armadillos eat my larvae - the beetles
Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web
Good article, interesting reading. Hard to believe it's been just ten years. If you weren't in elementary school (no offense, honest!) when you first heard the name Netscape, what did it mean to you? Anything?
Ten years ago these "places" (and in most cases the companies behind them) did not exist: Google. Yahoo! MSN. Blogger, obviously. There's lots more of course but I'm drawing a blank trying to think of some.
Dateline: summer, 1995. Microsoft's Bill Gates watched Windows 95 replace MS-DOS, and no doubt smiled as IBM's technically superior competing product (OS/2) withered and died.
AOL and Time Warner were separate companies. Oh wait, is that true again? No matter. Back then AOL - free! for 30 days! - had (1) a bad reputation, (2) slow, expensive service, (3) clueless users, and (4) token competition from Prodigy and Compuserve. What's that saying, the more things change...? User cluelessness is down, I suppose.
Internet Explorer? No such thing. Computer viruses existed but were relatively uncommon and hard to get. Trojan - that's a condom, right? Worms? Fishing lures. Spyware and adware weren't even words, though "spam" meant more than canned ham even then.
No DVD drives, MP3s, iPods, or X-Box. No Half-Life, standalone or multiplayer. Online games yes, but - well. The words limited and (comparatively) lame come to mind.
Thinking about this "wonderful" stuff makes me wonder: when did you start using the internet, and why (i.e. for what purpose(s))?
Hard to imagine the next ten years bringing an equal amount or "degree" of change. What do you think?
Friday update: OS/2 is now "officially" dead. Long live OS/2.
spotted on /.
iRad time |
7/14/2005 11:10:00 AM
12 Emissions:
Demosthenes - good to see you in top form :->
Rainpuddles - I know what you mean about reading terms etc. I'm mostly over them now, but it wasn't easy getting to this point.
98, 99, hotmail? Sounds right, but I would have guessed that came about later. Wonder if Microsoft owned them by that time; I can't remember.
By Demosthenes' account, I should be shot and paraded around town to be made an example of for the simple fact that *deep breath* I slightly enjoyed 'Moonstruck'.
radioactive - So very happy to see What About Bob on your list. One of the first movies I remember watching and laughing at (I must've been around 9, so I doubt I could've explained what it was that I found so funny).
I can't say I grew up with the Internet, although I did start using it when I was 11, just because I thought email was the coolest thing ever.
I do believe this is my first comment here… we’ll blame it on my tremendously lazy nature…
Anyway… I remember logging on to BBS’s with our kick ass, state of the art 1200 baud modem… yeah, that’s when we were rocking the 486/ 66mHz with an astounding 16 MB of RAM and a gaudy 300 MB hard drive… Seriously only took 5 minutes to boot up…(that was our 4th or 5th computer though, and I think it’s still performing some itsy bitsy Linux distro somewhere in my dad’s useless Linux cluster) Nothing finer than the sound of a dialup modem shaking hands across copper telephone lines…
Nadia - using email at 11 makes perfect sense to me. I'm guessing you had some friends hooked up as well; I doubt you were one of those unbalanced people (we won't mention any names) who sent most of their email to themselves just to stay "active" online.
"Don't ask me how I know" - Bobby Pinson
***
Jon! Glad you stopped in, feel free to waste as much time here as you want. And I know what you mean about dialup handshakes; I get to hear one every day at home.
Seems like this alone should explain, justify and validate my blogging activity at work.
Mmmm, BBS...
Ever play Trade Wars, or Yankee Trader?
I seriously doubt we'll see the same degree of change - it's one of those big evolutionary jumps; things will develop but at a different pace. Apart from blogging, there hasn't been much that's really new over the past, ooh, four or five years? And as fabulous as blogging, Flickr etc are - obviously - I don't subscribe to the "this is changing the world" belief.
I started using internet (primarily for a webmail account, not much more) in 1998. I was mildly terrified by the shrieking 27k modem. But then, I wrote out almost all my university essays by hand (1994-1997). Obviously I've never been an early adopter.
In 1999 I was *slightly* more active on the net (I remember being astonishingly bad at searches, but then, without Google, what do you expect?) and by 2000 I was in awe of Jeeves' all-embracing knowledgeability. It wasn't until 2001 though that I started relying on the web in work-related matters - that to me is a major milestone. I find it hard to understand how anyone could ever have done my job (involves a lot of fact-checking) before Google. Then again, I find it hard to understand how anyone could have published anything before Quark and Adobe, but newspapers do seem to have existed before DTP...
I don't even remember the first time i used the internet, i have used it so much after that, that everything just becomes a blur of surfing the internet over and over again. I actually think i am a little addicted to it. I have to come on at least once a day to check things...it is all really pointless actually because most of the time i don't get new emails, no one is on messenger to speak to and i have comments on blogger to check rarely. Although i would consider blogger to be a healthy habit of mine, since it helps me develop my writing skills, also i learn quite alot about politics from demosthenes' blog. It is all good really!
hey, you deserve a better comment, so i'll come back seeing as i am so bumming off my friends pc right now.
thanks for linking me!! syar's place is fine, i'll tell you if i come up with anything else. =) you made my day with your comment. *big smiles all around*
Computers are becoming quite powerful indeed. Why, with all of the amazing things computers can do, they almost meet all of the requirements for a living entity...I don't like that. We are being seconded by a robotic race of computers who are slowly taking over the world.
Hopefully in 10 years we will be living in the presence of Jesus on Earth. :)
By the way, I just read the post you made on my blog and I understand what you are confused about. I called my boss transvestite because he/she simply can't be two sexes at the same time, so he/she had to compensate by dressing up as a member of the opposite sex. Also, I did not say he/she was a hippie. i merely said that he/she LOOKED like a hippie when he/she dies his/her skin all sorts of colors.
I don't know where we'll be in 10 years. I don't know where I'll be in 10 days. I don't like to think like that.
But I do claim the fame of being the only person in the world whose parents got the Internet in its infancy so their kids could chat online. My parents are so cool.
Back then the World Wide Web was only one aspect of the internet. There were other, non WWW internets. You'd log on to AOL and choose one.
Anne - Compuserve was (is?) similar. I think the online services have always provided some non-www stuff. Wasn't AOL-bashing a popular activity among elitist snobs supposedly contributing signal (vs. noise) to usenet? That's where I first noticed it.
I suppose we don't have elitists anymore; wow we have 1337s and h4x0rs. And n00bs.
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