Jun 6th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Internet Before the Definite Article
Very interesting early nineties CBC report on the rise of “Internet”—a time before broadband and before Internet became the Internet:
I was a sufficiently early adopter that I have some vague recollections of Gopher and WAIS as well as Prodigy.
36 Responses to “Internet Before the Definite Article”
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June 6th, 2009 at 11:32 am
2:13. I am deeply saddened that even back then there was an alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
June 6th, 2009 at 11:35 am
“Very interesting early nineties CBC report on the rise of “Internet”—a time before broadband and before Internet became the Internet … I was a sufficiently early adopter that I have some vague recollections of Gopher and WAIS as well as Prodigy.”
Well, as long as we’re discussing terminology, I feel free to point out that Prodigy had nothing to do with internet or the internet.
A self-contained WAN is definitionally not the internet…
June 6th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Maybe if they had had better internet skills, the CBC could have researched the correct flag to put up for someone writing from Oslo.
June 6th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I was a sufficiently early adopter that I have some vague recollections of Gopher and WAIS as well as Prodigy
Let me fix that for you: I am so old that I have some vague recollections of Gopher and WAIS as well as Prodigy.
June 6th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I’d forgotten that Peter Mansbridge was almost entirely bald by that early date.
June 6th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Not a lot of cursing or personal attacks? Not screens full of ‘Go to hell!’
Ahh, the good old days.
June 6th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Those who don’t remember Kermit are doomed to repeat it.
June 6th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I miss Mosaic…
June 6th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Did anyone else notice that by the end they stopped calling it “internet” and started calling it “the internet”?
June 6th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Prodigy? Slap bracelets? Early 90’s nostalgia must be hitting matt pretty hard. flannel shirts anyone?
June 6th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Note at the end the reporter notes that congress is about to hold hearings on internet. I wonder if those hearings were part of what Al Gore was taken out of context on.
June 6th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Not a lot of cursing and swearing. Clearly way before the DFHs took over the internets.
June 6th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Limited cursing and swearing because it was before “the September than never ended”.
June 6th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
I’m so old I remember the Backbone Cabal and The Great Renaming.
June 6th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Internet was an adjective not a noun. I’ve never heard the construction that used internet as a standalone noun without the definite article. There were internet protocols and internet applications, but I’ve never heard “internet” as if it were Cher or Madonna.
Those who don’t remember Kermit are doomed to repeat it.
We wrote a file transfer program for the Model II/HP3000. We finished it and sent it out around 6 weeks before everyone started asking us if we had Kermit. Kermit was so much better and easier, but the other program had been ours.
A Gopher site was a drag to maintain, btw. And wasn’t there also a Veronica?
June 6th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Yeah un huh sure they were sharing recipes and philosophic discussions on superstring theory. They were exchanging porn. or pr0n..
June 6th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Hey, I wrote an entire accounting system for that machine, for the DoE. In COBOL.
Awhile before that I wrote a little program that would let you type a message to another person. The bell on their machine would go “ding” to let them know the message had arrived. This was in 1971; my girlfriend in Toronto and I in Providence were the only users. Later there were more.
(Adirondacker: string theory is porn.)
June 6th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I laughed so hard when he talked about people being “restrained” despite being anonymous.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
I laughed so hard when he talked about people being “restrained” despite being anonymous.
Early USENET groups weren’t particularly anonymous. Your email address appeared in the headers of your posts. Most email accounts were attached to large organizations — corporations, education, or government. There weren’t organization that existed primarily to provide you with an email account. Email meant uucp which meant that your email was associated with a particular unix box that existed somewhere traceable. If you were paranoid, you could forge headers, of course, but nobody seemed to care. People flamed and were flamed in return, but there was a tad more politeness.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
People flamed and were flamed in return, but there was a tad more politeness.
It is perhaps worth noting that (according to Wikipedia) Godwin’s Law was declared in 1990.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
about the Elder Days
before the September that never ended
Jeffrey Davis skrev :
People flamed and were flamed in return, but there was a tad more politeness.
there was Emily Postnews
I can’t think of an analagous set of codified norms for the Web.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
“Early USENET groups weren’t particularly anonymous.”
Anonymity wasn’t particularly important prior to the introduction of webcrawling search engines around ‘94-’95.
It’s only the existence of search indices that make pseudonymity required behavior.
June 6th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Yglesias is showing an interest in grammar. What’s not to like about that?
June 6th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
“It is perhaps worth noting that (according to Wikipedia) Godwin’s Law was declared in 1990.”
Tangentially, I recently watched Into the Storm, the reasonably good HBO documentary on Winston Churchill, and the movie made the point that Churchill actually invented Godwin’s Law.
The movie asserts that Churchill lost the 1945 elections because he said that Labor would employ Gestapo tactics if they won, and that the British electorate employed the corollary to Godwin’s Law which says whoever brings up the Nazis is considered to have lost the argument.
June 6th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I have been using the intrnet since before the world wide web and it was always called the internet (it was in the ’80s anyhow). The way they use ‘internet’ on this clip sounds weird.
June 6th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
PS Towards the end of the clip you hear people that understand the jargon and they satrt using ‘internet’ with the definite article.
June 6th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I have been using the intrnet since before the world wide web and it was always called the internet (it was in the ’80s anyhow). The way they use ‘internet’ on this clip sounds weird.
Actually, “internet” has been used for many decades in the Southern U.S. to signify that a medical-doctor-in-training consumed food.
(”Intern et,” get it? Oh, I slay myself.)
June 6th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I can’t think of an analagous set of codified norms for the Web.
That’s mainly because instantly-posted comments were very rare until the late 90s, and then primarily on commercial sites with moderators. Server admins were understandably reluctant to allow unrestricted use of CGI on shared or non-commercial servers; the maturation of PHP in 1997-8 was vital in allowing the small-scale web to go interactive.
So, while you had guestbooks and other tangential elements, websites were largely one-way publishing for, let’s say, the first four years After Netscape. The discussions continued on newsgroups or sites that aped newsgroups, and those codified norms were largely taken from newsgroups. That still left elements that didn’t have a direct newsgroup antecedent, such as blogrolls or link-based acknowledgements and citations, but early bloggers such as Rebecca Blood spent plenty of time talking and thinking about etiquette when it began to seem necessary.
June 6th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Well for me, for the first few years, “internet” = trn newsgroups…
June 6th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I agree with Chris Dornan and take it one step further. I think this reporter is wrong. What we now call the internet began as the “arpanet”, a computer network sponsored by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), which has since become DARPA (Defense …). They changed the name from “the” arpanet to “the internet” to emphasize that it was to have a commercial component. I remember at the time thinking that .com addresses were not going to be very useful. Why would a company want to use the arpanet?
June 6th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
How wrong they were when projecting into the future. But then again who could have predicted that the internet would transform from being a big truck in to the wonderful series of tubes we enjoy today.
June 6th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
I am deeply saddened that even back then there was an alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
His TV show ran from ‘92 to ‘96. When it was cancelled, we all thought he had peaked.
For my part, as a veteran of the acoustic coupler era, there were very early, vigorous debates over the “Internet vs. the Internet” question. It largely seemed to hinge on how you came to it — for instance, almost nobody ever said “the arpanet”. To some people, it was arrogance to say that there was now one Internet. To others, the Internet meant simply the parts in between, the way the Interstate connects local streets.
I wonder if those hearings were part of what Al Gore was taken out of context on.
One source says this aired October 8, 1993. This was probably related to the Clinton administration National Information Infrastructure, but Gore was already partly responsible for a great deal of “information superhighway” legislation during his service in Congress.
June 7th, 2009 at 12:45 am
“Let me fix that for you: I am so old that I have some vague recollections of Gopher and WAIS as well as Prodigy.”
Let me fix that for you: Matt is so YOUNG that he has some vague recollections of Gopher and WAIS as well as Prodigy.
Whereas I remember 300-baud modems – and later a wondrous *1200-baud* modem – connected to BBS systems, and having to leave messages for sysops explaining that my name was not phony, so could I please have an account.
And yes, I downloaded my first B&W babe picture off one of those BBS systems.
I was on the WELL back when it was being run out of a shack over in Sausalito. I was host of the Atari conference on it, and almost got a job being the on-line spokesperson for Atari in 1987, IIRC. I was on CompuServe and BIX, too – but never Prodigy because Prodigy was considered LAME.
So naturally Matt was probably on Prodigy.
June 8th, 2009 at 7:03 am
I vividly remember waiting 45 minutes at the tender age of 12 in ‘92 and listening to Pearl Jam as slowly but surely, a black and white, seminude image of Cindy Crawford appeared. At the time it was mindblowing, but tame compared to what I imagine 12 year old can access nowadays. The kids today….
June 8th, 2009 at 9:35 am
I was a sufficiently early adopter that I have some vague recollections of Gopher and WAIS as well as Prodigy.
.
Remember Lynx? That was the internet “browser” before there were browsers.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
The Brit who says he’s a fan of all things Thai, eh? Maybe CBC didn’t/doesn’t have the scurrilous mind that I have. I suspect he may not have been talking about Thai cuisine….