What’s the Internet? (on 1994's Today Show)

kkleiner writes "In a hilarious video segment from January 24th 1994, The Today Show morning anchors Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric stumble over the identity and jargon of the internet technology that has come to define the past decade. Gumbel is unclear how you pronounce "@", Katie Couric suggests "about", and no one wants to say "dot" when they read ".com". Confusion with lingo aside, The Today Show cast has to ask a crew member to clarify how the internet works. Do you write to it like mail? Is it just in Universities? Does it require a phone line? This was less than two decades ago, and it's a wonderful reminder of how unprepared the mainstream media was for the innovation that was about to sweep the globe. As the crew member says of the internet, "it's getting bigger and bigger all the time." What a delightful understatement."

Comments

Why is this funny?

[wideBlueSkies]

You can't exactly blame these guys for not knowing. The information superhighway was new or unheard of to about 95% of people at that time. Heck, AOL and compuserve hadn't even peaked yet.

You could probably have blamed their producers or research people though.. for not giving them the 5 minute education beforehand.

Re:Why is this funny?

[eldavojohn]

You could probably have blamed their producers or research people though.. for not giving them the 5 minute education beforehand.

I might point out that the format of these daily TV shows seems to encourage uninformed people to learn with the host(s). We work day jobs so we don't see this anymore but I think what appeals to my grandmother about Regis is that he acts like an average guy just trying to figure stuff out ... and she can identify with that. Note that I said "uninformed" not "stupid." I would posit that the American people would rather embark on a learning adventure than be lectured ... I think this is why Bill Nye (yes, I know he wasn't the original) appealed to me so much as a kid.

I agree I didn't find this very funny, I did not have a computer at the time and spent the majority of my free time reading, bailing hay, playing trombone and walking endless up and down acres of field collecting rocks baseball size or larger. Had you asked me about any of the technologies they addressed here, my answer might have been just as hilarious and even more clueless. Oh well, gotta start somewhere.

I found it cute or quaint at worst. Cute to recall the time when we didn't have this powerful force dictating and providing so much.

Re:Why is this funny?

[chemicaldave]

It's not funny that they don't know what the Internet is, they just serve as the face of society when few people understood what the Internet was. Although I'd bet a majority of society still doesn't know, it's funny to look back on how we reacted to learning about it?

Re:Why is this funny?

[elrous0]

1994 was the year I first got internet access myself. And my access consisted of an email address, telnet, and gopher. Almost no one had WWW access then (though Cello and Mosaic were around). It would be another 1995 before I would get a SLIP account to access the web directly (and this was at a major university). So, yeah, I don't really fault them either for not knowing.

Re:Why is this funny?

[commodore64_love]

>>>I agree I didn't find this very funny

I think it's funny but not in the "haha you're stupid" vein, but more like how you laugh when a child is first learning to walk or write. My niece wrote "I hat you" on my laptop and when I read it out loud, she started laughing at herself.

I like to watch old videos from the 80s era. People are even more ignorant. "You call this a keyboard?" Um... yeah that's what it be called. Just like a typewriter.

Re:Why is this funny?

[commodore64_love]

I got internet in 1988 via 1 kbit/s modem. I was one of the lucky ones who had an internet BBS nearby, so I could access the email and newsgroups of the period (also Fidonet).

My first web browser was Mosaic for Commodore Amiga in 1993. Then Mac Mosaic, Mac Netscape, and finally I sold my soul and bought a Win98 PC (and computing grew dull).

Re:Why is this funny?

[LWATCDR]

Actually it is bad because they did so little research. It is interesting because it was so early. This predates Netscape, Yahoo and the other internet startups.

Re:Why is this funny?

[eln]

It's interesting to contemplate how much things have changed since then. In 1994 I was a junior in high school and had to give a presentation on some sort of computer-related topic to my CS class. I chose the Internet, which I had been on for about 5 years by then, and nobody else in the class had even heard of it. To assist in my research, my teacher lent me a copy of O'Reilly's "Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" (first edition). That book, at around 420 pages long, told you basically everything you needed to know to use the Internet at that time, including a fairly comprehensive list of the most useful gopher, web, and ftp sites available.

Later that year, I taught a class on building personal web pages to a small group. We covered basically everything there was to know about creating state-of-the-art web pages at the time in a single day.

A year later, the dot com boom happened and everything changed. Prior to 1995, though, the Internet was still largely unknown to the general public.

Re:Why is this funny?

[chargen]

Geez, they could have educated themselves with a quick 5 minute Google search!

Re:Why is this funny?

[mikael]

Same here - most companies and colleges had internal E-mail systems, but getting access to any national network (JANET) required being involved in research. Demon Internet was the first ISP residential service provider in 1993/4 and provided USENET/E-mail access using just a V.34 modem, PPP, and a TCP/IP on DOS.

E-mail and web addresses were common on the side of vans or shop windows until around 2000. It's funny to see them engraved on metal and concrete manhole covers, metal tape and

Re:Why is this funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

1996 is when my high school in Podunk was supposed to get its T1 line (which then was a 60 mile cable run from Chicago as the local COs did not possess those capabilities). I took the sociology class to be the tech liaison for the internet portion of the class. It wasn't installed until it was too late for the class, however. The following year, I became the first "Tech Aide" which was a "student aide" offering that was created at my school for me.

Re:Why is this funny?

[MPolo]

Hmm... In 1989 I got to Graduate School, where I had email, telnet, gopher and news. After leaving school, around 1993 or so, I had a dialup account with Steve Jackson games with the same sort of all-text access (presumably I could have used lynx, but I didn't really know about the WWW at that point). Would that I had kept an email address at io.com! They were offering home SLIP connections, but they cost more than I was willing to pay (and needed a more able computer than I had at the moment). If you ordered a SLIP connection, you were required to buy a reference book from them, as you were expected to troubleshoot yourself.

Re:Why is this funny?

[c6gunner]

It's interesting to contemplate how much things have changed since then. In 1994 I was a junior in high school and had to give a presentation on some sort of computer-related topic to my CS class. I chose the Internet, which I had been on for about 5 years by then, and nobody else in the class had even heard of it.

Funny, I did the same thing in 1994. Except the topic of my presentation was "why the internet will never catch on".

Whoops.

Re:Why is this funny?

[oracleguy01]

That would be a great thing to read today. I am sure you aren't the only one that thought so at the time though.

Re:Why is this funny?

[Jason Levine]

I had only gotten Internet access a year prior. I remember hopping onto gopher and being wide-eyed as I went from "site" to "site." Then I stopped at an entry titled "Middle East." Suddenly, I worried about getting in trouble for causing long-distance charges to my school so I signed off. I quickly learned that you didn't incur long distance charges online, though and clicked away next time.

Of course, not too long later, I dialed in from home and was downloading some freeware from a "far away location" (i.e. another state). My father heard what I was doing and got upset that I was costing him long distance fees. He didn't understand either at the time.

Now, we semi-regularly use Skype to video chat. (Lets them talk to my kids who do better with a "video phone" than a normal phone. Kids don't quite understand that the other person can't see what you see.) How technology's changed in just 17 years. Imagine what it will be like in 2028! ("What do you mean you had to type things out? With your fingers? Why didn't you just use thought-2-computer tech?")

Re:Why is this funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, in 1994 I had been on the net for about 2 years. It really wasn't like it is today. Gopher sites abounded, before the 'protect the children, think of the children' folk killed it, IRC was really big. This is all pre-Google, pre Yahoo. To be fair, I thought initially that the internet was like a giant collection of BBS's (something I could relate to, since I'd been using BBS's for about 4-5 years). Google came along, Youtube, Amazon, Ebay, Google Maps, Netflix, and dozens of other sites everyone uses, no one wants to be without, and in 1994, people were unsure about @--at and .--dot. That internet thing. And yes, a 5 minute quickie would have given them a heads up. And yes, if they look at it now, they look silly. If you were to show it to them, they would tell you that they didn't know (which appears obvious). You had to be a geek then to know. To be fair, Mark Zuckerberg was only 10 years old, and may not have known either.

Re:Why is this funny?

[Smauler]

I personally basically exclusively used the internet for porn back then. alt.sex groups, etc, with text editors and uuencode/decode. Loads of posters used non-standard starts and stops, so you had to manually edit them. This was back when I was 14 or so.

I didn't use email, because no one I knew was on it.... the web was listless generally in its infancy. I only really loved MUDs, and I discovered them when they were on their wane. Everything since has become everyday for me...

On a seperate but similarly stupid note, I've got a book from the early 80s which denigrates mice as control mechanisms...

Re:Why is this funny?

[mmarlett]

In 1994, I was editor of the third daily online newspaper in the world (the Kansas State eCollegian). This not only wasn't funny, but really, really common. I had conversations with people like this all the time for at least a year. Mostly alumni calling over the phone, trying to find out how to read the college newspaper. And it was way more difficult to try to tell someone that, no, having a subscription to AOL is not Internet access but a closed BBS. And Prodigy. And whatever other service you're about to ask me about.

Re:Why is this funny?

[nite_warrior]

just to find out that it is a series of tubes

Re:Why is this funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I got online myself in 1992. I remember being thrilled when I emailed Robert Jung (of ARJ fame) and got a reply 10 minutes later. That was way cooler than the BBSes and FidoNet. By 1994, we had a network set up in the basement of the house we were renting and sharing a single 14.4k dialup link over PPP. Whenever my roommate fired up Mosaic, we'd all complain, since the rest of us were using UNIX text mode apps.

Re:Why is this funny?

[Chuq]

True.. some successful business people even thought so... for example ... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0453009212?ie=UTF8&tag=chsbl04-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0453009212

Re:Why is this funny?

[jedidiah]

Yeah, but the @ and .com stuff is basic Internet stuff that predated even the web.

While 1994 was early for the consumer Internet, the net was still around then and used by Universities.

Universities... where journalists come from.

Re:Why is this funny?

[siddesu]

Well, it depends.

The @ symbol, for one, isn't from teh Internets, it has been in use as "at" for much longer in business accounting.

As in

20 apples @ $0.85 = [left as exercise for the reader]

Re:Why is this funny?

[LWATCDR]

If a Journalist at that time ever got close to a computer hooked up to the internet. Those journalists probably graduated in the 70s or early 80s. Internet and even computers access for liberal arts majors wasn't common.

Re:Why is this funny?

[eugene ts wong]

Do you mean that you kids might try to wave at somebody while using a regular phone?

Re:Why is this funny?

[jellomizer]

At best they would communicate with their friends via email to an other university. That is about it. Chances are they didn't even know it was email they would have called it Pine or Elm or something like that. The Internet was for Technology Major/Geeks that is where they could live and be somewhat popular.

Re:Why is this funny?

[jellomizer]

You mean AltaVista? A year later?

Re:Why is this funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that news teams will report WITH AN OPINION without understanding the whole matter is not a new nor old thing. They still will do it all the time.

Re:Why is this funny?

[eugene ts wong]

What was the rational for that?

Re:Why is this funny?

[c6gunner]

Oh, I don't remember the exact rationale. I'm pretty sure it involved the accessibility/complexity issue, the lack of material that most people would find interesting, etc. You gotta realize the internet of 1994 was a far different creature than what we have today. Even having gotten to see video-conferencing with a school in a different country, I was intrigued and impressed, but didn't expect it to have any impact on most people. I think part of my rationale must have been something along the lines of "BBS's have been around for more than 15 years, and most people have never even heard of them". I guess I didn't see the potential for what it could become.

Re:Why is this funny?

[kencf0618]

I've been on-line in one forum or another since August of 1989 (think cold fusion). Modem hiss... FidoNet... BBSes... and StarFlight. Nowadays I edit Wikipedia, run a couple of Tor relays and plaster myself all over Facebook. Who knows what the 2020's shall bring?

Re:Why is this funny?

[slycrel]

On a number of occasions my children (when young) would nod their heads instead of saying yes or no as well as pointing with their fingers. It's funny when I would ask "Is mom there?" and get no answer, then when my wife gets on she asks why the kid was pointing at her. =)

Re:Why is this funny?

[Em Adespoton]

I remember, around 1994, being introduced to the World Wide Web and saying "well this is silly; it doesn't do anything you couldn't do easier with Gopher or FTP/Archie...."

Then again, that was before Web Browsers became operating systems; Mosaic and Lynx were where it was at.
Come to think of it, that was the same year I installed SLiRP so I could use something more than a terminal session to connect to the internet from home.... using Eudora in "Internet Mode" was MUCH nicer than using it as a dial-up client that didn't sync perfectly with elm.

Re:Why is this funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bryant Gumble was always an idiot. His behavior in Seoul for the Olympics epitomized his character. He is a shallow, alcoholic, brain-deprived, misogynistic diva.

Re:Why is this funny?

[moogaloonie]

Even if they did know more (and it's pretty apparent they didn't), asking the most basic of questions is essential to the type of piece they were doing. The point of educating them beforehand would just to be to make them look smarter than they are. Since they didn't know more, and didn't expect their average audience member to know more than them, doing the piece as a group learning experience probably made sense.

Re:Why is this funny?

[Teancum]

What made a difference between the web vs. Gopher was the ability to embed images into the content... which made all of the difference. Clickable images and mapped images really started to make some inroads, not to mention being able to select fonts and font sizes. Gopher allowed you to view the images, but not in context with text. Ditto for FTP sites. It took the web to put everything together.

Re:Why is this funny?

[bonch]

Prepare to get modbombed for daring to be skeptical of global warming alarmism on Slashdot.

Re:Why is this funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was born in 1980 and got my first computer at age 15, and really wanted to get on the internet, mainly because I kept reading about how much porn was on it! I vividly remember enjoying www.penthouse.com in 1995, so web access wasn't that rare.

(Turned out that the dial-up number I used was long distance and my parents got a $380 phone bill that I had to pay for.)

Re:Why is this funny?

[Culture20]

OK, in 1994 I had been on the net for about 2 years. It really wasn't like it is today. Gopher sites abounded, before the 'protect the children, think of the children' folk killed it, IRC was really big. This is all pre-Google, pre Yahoo.

Concur. A friend of mine still has his "Internet Yellow Pages" copy. I'm not talking about a ypbind config file; I'm talking about an actual book, printed with IP addresses with cool things to do on the Internet. There weren't search engines then. I remember when search engines blossomed, and learning how to do the same search in all of the different engines was a useful skill.

Re:Why is this funny?

[Chris Burke]

See and that's exactly why for the longest time, prior to getting on the internet, I thought "@" meant "each". :)

Re:Why is this funny?

[nobodie]

I was online with my first laptop at the time and getting my first email address (at netscape.net) and actually remember the show and remember howling at it. I wasn't THAT geeky was I????

Re:Why is this funny?

[BluBrick]

Heh, somewhere around '92-'93 I heard someone refer to the "@" symbol as "atterate". It took me a few days before I finally realised he was saying "at a rate".
In fact, I find just a little surprising that the @ symbol was not used for a multiplication sign - considering that multiplication was implied by its original accounting use, and of course it existed on just about every typewriter being made when computers were new.

Re:Why is this funny?

[frizzantik]

yep, sounds familiar.. I had a shell account in 1994.. I recall at one point finding this program which you could run on your shell account and it would give you SLIP access to the net. At the time, SLIP cost a lot more than a shell account.

Re:Why is this funny?

[rolando2424]

"What do you mean you had to type things out? With your fingers? Why didn't you just use thought-2-computer tech?"

Marty McFly: [showing the two boys how to play the shoot 'em up video game] I'll show you, kid. I'm a crack shot at this.
[shoots a perfect score with the electronic gun]
Video Game Boy #1: You mean you have to use your hands?
Video Game Boy #2: That's like a baby's toy!
-- Back to the Future Part II

Re:Why is this funny?

[Jason Levine]

Just over 2 decades after BTTF 2, we have the Wii, Kinect and other "handless" or nearly-handless computer gaming systems. It's not too far-fetched to think that our kids, or our kids' kids will think of hand-held gaming as a baby toy while the "big kid games" are controlled by moving around.

Re:Why is this funny?

[operagost]

Prepare to get modbombed

And so it was!

It's a series of tubes

[Toe, The]

Even today, a lot of people are pretty dang confused about what them there internets have on 'em.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[h00manist]

Even today, a lot of people are pretty dang confused about what them there internets have on 'em.

And how to drive a non-automatic transmission vehicle, switch the AV setup from cable to watch the dvd, calculate their interest on the credit card, what's the relationship of pounds to kilos and meters to feet, read a map... Basic everyday activities. The internet did improve this, but education still could use a revolution.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[EvanED]

Basic everyday activities.

The problem is that some of those things aren't really "basic everyday activities." Most dramatically, it certainly isn't a basic everyday activity for most people to drive a stick shift -- because most people don't have stick shifts. When are you going to drive one? There have only been a couple times ever where I've even really been in a situation in which I might have driven a stick if I knew how. (I'm not speaking from the authority of age here, but I have been driving for over a decade.)

Re:It's a series of tubes

[EvanED]

(Just to clarify: in case it isn't obvious, I'm talking about the USA when it comes to automatics vs sticks. I realize that, for whatever reason, sticks are a lot more popular in most other places.)

Re:It's a series of tubes

[dmacleod808]

I'll give up my stick shift when you pry it from my cold dead hands...

Re:It's a series of tubes

[B1oodAnge1]

You're missing out. Standard Transmission is the only way to drive.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[frank_adrian314159]

...a lot of people are pretty dang confused about what them there internets have on 'em.

You mean besides the porn?

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Smauler]

Just to support your point somewhat... I'm a truck driver, and car driver of 15 years. I recently got in a 20 tonne rigid truck, and had no idea how to drive it. I had to ask someone before I set off.

I'm from England, and it was an automatic.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Anonymous Coward]

a non-automatic transmission vehicle

Really now? "Non-automatic Transmission?" Really?

Re:It's a series of tubes

[EvanED]

Hey, I'd love to be able to drive a manual, but I'll have my current car for some time more. When I do finally get out of grad school and get around to getting a new car, I might get some old beat-up stick shift for a while, learn to drive with it, then actually buy the new car.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Nadaka]

Standards are no longer standard.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[demonlapin]

I know people love to say this, but what does a manual transmission legitimately get you, other than a sore left leg and a very small increase in mileage? I mean, if you're counting on your car not shifting in order for it to remain stable through a turn (or whatever), aren't you really driving too fast for conditions? And even if you're a professional F1 driver, shouldn't you slow the hell down on public roads?

Re:It's a series of tubes

[zonky]

Engine Braking.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Man Eating Duck]

I know people love to say this, but what does a manual transmission legitimately get you, other than a sore left leg and a very small increase in mileage?

There are actually a few other advantages: you get better control of force and rpm, which is important on slippery roads, especially going up steep hills. An experienced manual driver can climb a snowy driveway better than any automatic, even with anti-spin. An automatic will lag, and you need to be able to make split-second variations in force to the wheels. I always disable anti-spin even in a manual vehicle as I can do better myself. You achieve this by judicious use of the clutch and gas pedals in combination, but it does take experience :)

You get more precise control of engine rpm, this can lead to more comfortable driving, especially at high speeds. I've driven automatics plenty of times, and occasionally I find myself trying to nudge the automatic into shifting, usually it lags a second or two if it shifts at all.

You can also use the engine for braking. This is a small issue, but can be convenient if you live in an area with lots of mountains.

At the end of the day it comes down to personal preference. Where I live manual is the norm, and it's what I prefer. Many prefer automatics because of the convenience, I prefer increased control.

On a side note I used to drive a scooter (Vespa) all year round, with manual four-speed transmission and good tyres this is viable even if you get tons of snow in the winter as we do. A scooter with variable transmission is impossible to drive on snow and ice. This is similar to my first point, only a lot more accentuated on two wheels :)

I'd guess that a vast majority of people in the USA don't need these advantages, but I hope this partly answers your question :)

Re:It's a series of tubes

[tie_guy_matt]

I live in the US and I prefer standard transmission. The gap isn't as big as it used to be, but typically you do get better performance and mileage with a stick shift. Also stick shifts typically require less maintenance. Unless you ride the clutch, a manual transmission should last for the life of the car with no maintenance whatsoever. With an automatic you have to change the fluid every 30-50,000 miles -- or at least you SHOULD change the fluid ( RTFM, if you don't you will probably end up buying a new transmission faster than you would like.)

I find that any more than 6 gears and shifting becomes a chore. These days you can expect to have at least six gears on your auto -- many cars have even more. Then you have CVT transmissions that basically have an infinite number of gears. As these transmissions become more popular then the advantages of a stick shift will start to go away (at least on paper -- stick shifts will always be more fun.) And if we ever switch to electric cars then transmissions in general will become all but useless.

I find that it is much more economical to buy a used car. Alas it is getting difficult to find a used car with standard transmission in the US. So my current car is an automatic. As much as I love standard transmission it didn't seem worth it to me to spend significantly more money for one. At least my car has flappy paddles on the wheel for shifting that let me engine break and get some of the control from a stick shift back -- of course the paddles respond slower than a real stick shift would. I love how when you put it in manual mode and use the paddles the odometer display will show no other information except what gear you are in. Since you are now shifting gears manually the car makers don't want to distract you with any more info. Funny, when I had a stick shift I would shift gears without even thinking about it -- now my cars doesn't think I am smart enough to do that. I bet most people who buy cars with those paddles never use them and really have no idea what they are there for.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[demonlapin]

I live in flat land where it doesn't snow every year, so other than for-the-fun-of-it there's no real reason to own a manual. It explains a great deal. Thanks.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Anonymous Coward]

Control. Driving an automatic in ice & snow scares the * out of me.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you americans insist on calling it 'stick shift' ? What the hell do you call your gear stick on an automatic transmission? /end rant

Re:It's a series of tubes

[demonlapin]

Honestly, though, doesn't that mean you should be going slower?

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Culture20]

Control. Driving an automatic in ice & snow scares the * out of me.

It shouldn't. The stick shift cars are the ones I see out of control and accelerating too fast in slippery conditions. I have excellent control with my automatic.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Dabido]

pr0n. End of confusion.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Anonymous Coward]

Passing.

I see a hole in oncoming traffic, long enough for passing, and while waiting for the last oncoming car to pass, I push down the clutch, shift down, and keep the clutch down until the car has passed. I'm in the right gear, ready to pass as soon as there is room. No waiting for automatic kickdown.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[Anonymous Coward]

you have been driving for over a decade in the US.

if you would have taken 1 driving lesson in europe you would know how to drive with a stick shift.

Re:It's a series of tubes

[EvanED]

Um, that's kind of my point. What one person considers an "everyday experience" is far from that for many others.

It's a self-reinforcing loop here: classes don't feel the need to teach manuals, so people don't learn manuals, so people don't buy manuals (and rental car companies don't stock them), so classes don't feel the need to teach them.

And so even people who are kind of interested in learning (like me) don't learn, because... where are we going to? Am I really going to go out and pay for a course so that I can learn a skill so that when I buy a new car I can put a lot of extra effort into getting a car that will let me use it so that I can work more while driving? There's a bit of hyperbole in that sentence, but I think a lot of truth too.

I'll agree that there are a number of ways that driver's ed and licensing programs here could be improved, and that places in Europe do both rather better -- but I think "they teach manuals" is rather far down on that list.

Crusoe launch

[suso]

Isn't Bryant Gumbel the same guy that asked that stupid question at the Transmeta press conference?

Oh, and the @ sign was there long before the Internet. Where do they get these people?

Re:Crusoe launch

[sznupi]

@ was there, but I think not really in daily use by common folks. Just be glad you're not stuck with a word which means "monkey" or "ape" (yes, I know the difference in EN, but in my language it's much less delineated) - can you imagine how stupid this one sounds in serious situations?

Re:Crusoe launch

[silly_sysiphus]

My preference is in italiano: "chiocciola"--snail. It's rather fun to get to refer to your email address as "sysiphus snail wind.it" (etc)

Re:Crusoe launch

[Anonymous Coward]

can you imagine how stupid this one sounds in serious situations?

I've heard this plenty of times in very serious situations of the 21st century: "firstName bottomShortLine lastName monkeyTail blabla dot" and a couple of years ago I've even heard something like "myName monkeyTail companyName something... nevermind, just make sure you spell the companyName right and IT should know where to deliver it" ....... I guess someone should introduce them to business cards.

captcha: vomited

Re:Crusoe launch

[mikael]

1993/1994 was the time the first TCP/IP stacks became available for PC's - you could run SLIP or PPP through a standard dial-up modem and your PC was "a node on the Internet" with it's own static IP address.... then by default you had your own mail server and even have the ISP dial your PC to run an HTTP server, or pay extra for an ISDN line.

There were so few E-mail addresses and they changed so infrequently that some companies came out with white-page E-mail address books sold in the local bookstores.

Re:Crusoe launch

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked him better in Gumble to Gumble - Beach Justice.

Re:Crusoe launch

[Freultwah]

Jó napot kívánok, uram. Az e-mail címem elnök majom társaság pont hu. Something similar?

Re:Crusoe launch

[wordsnyc]

Trumpet Winsock! I actually paid for it.

Re:Crusoe launch

[TheRaven64]

The @ sign is (or was) used a lot by greengrocers on signs. As in 'Orange's @ 25p each'[1]. I saw that quite frequently in the '80s, although it seems to have gone out of fashion now, presumably because people use @ to mean 'something Internet related' on signs. It wasn't that it was on your keyboard, it was that it was a fairly common symbol, although maybe not in the US (odd though, because using @ for email was a convention that comes from the USA - Ray Tomlinson in 1971 picked it because 'person at computer' seemed like an obvious way of identifying recipients).

[1] By law and convention, greengrocers are not allowed to use apostrophes correctly.

Re:Crusoe launch

[nickrw]

[1] By law and convention, greengrocers are not allowed to use apostrophes correctly.

I'm fairly sure you meant *greengrocer's and *apostrophe's there.

Re:Crusoe launch

[sznupi]

"somebody snail mail.it" would sound ... interesting (sadly, the domain seems unused)

Re:Crusoe launch

[petman]

Interestingly, in my country, @ is used as the symbol for "alias". As in, when somebody formally changes their name, their identity cards would then show their new name @ their old name.

E.g. Name given at birth: Yawn Philips
New name: John Philips
Shown on identity card: John @ Yawn Philips

So when e-mails came out, we used to pronounce our e-mail addresses as, "FirstName DOT LastName ALIAS Company DOT com".

Re:Crusoe launch

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Bryant Gumbel the same guy that asked that stupid question at the Transmeta press conference?

Oh, and the @ sign was there long before the Internet. Where do they get these people?

Bryant Gumbel is the same guy who on 9/11 asked a pilot he was interviewing, after the second plane hit the WTC live, if he thinks it was an accident or coincidence.

Re:Crusoe launch

[sznupi]

More or less; though that's not the only language with quite common "sz" ;p (strangely, "sz" and "s" seem to work opposite...)

Re:Crusoe launch

[sznupi]

it was a fairly common symbol, although maybe not in the US

Probably further - maybe it was fairly common... in very few places (among them, apparently, the UK(?)). Anyway, I just checked and I certainly can't see it on by far the most popular keyboard type at my place in '80s (and well into the '90s) - mechanical typowriter ;p

Re:Crusoe launch

[sznupi]

Ahh... "typowriter"... irony meter implodes (yes, typewriter ;) )

Couric & Gumbel aren't any better informed tod

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither is Lauer. Neither is most everyone in the media. Journalism: for those who are too unskilled to do anything else.

phone lines?

[alen]

what's a phone line? my telephone works through time warner cable or the air

Re:phone lines?

[blair1q]

telephone? don't you have IM or twitter or facebook?

Re:phone lines?

[Nadaka]

Silly. A phone line is the gesture used on the iPhone to launch the default phone app.

Re:phone lines?

[MikeDirnt69]

Is that thing we use to go into the Matrix.

Re:phone lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

telephone? don't you have IM or twitter or facebook?

This reminds me of a young co-worker I have who posted to Facebook from her cellphone last week that due to the weather, she was cut off from communicating with the outside world...

Re:phone lines?

[commodore64_love]

>>>what's a phone line?

It's the twisted-pair copper that carries my internet (upto 50 Mbit/s via VDSL2).

Speaking of phone lines, can my 56K Dialup modem be made to work through my cellphone? I'm thinking of an emergency use, like with the egyptians who have lost internet. The challenge would be connecting the POTS line from the modem to the cellphone's input. (Maybe this cable would work - http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/7830/ )

Re:phone lines?

[uglyduckling]

No, you can't use your 56K modem over your cellphone... I'm not entirely sure if you're asking a real question or not, but if you want to know the answer - voice traffic over cellphones is compressed in a way that makes sense for voice - mostly the system ensures that everything arrives in the right order, and that there are not significant pauses. Voice communication is pretty tolerant to small gaps in the signal, so generally the network will just drop short segments because that it more natural in conversation that having pauses etc. in the middle of works while the network catches up. For baseband data (i.e. encoded on an audio signal, like an analogue modem) you want the system to _never_ drop data and never pause, you want it to just worsen in quality, and the modem will negotiate down on the rate until it can keep a reliable connection.

Re:phone lines?

[gman99]

Hmm... I've definitely used dial-up via my mobile phone "back in the day" ...I had a mobile contract with tone of free minutes to landline numbers; which included the local ISP. Perhaps your statement is true for CDMA (no idea) -- definitely worked over GSM

I used the phone as an IRDA modem for the Palm Vx for Internet on the move. Good times....

Re:phone lines?

[MBGMorden]

Speaking of phone lines, can my 56K Dialup modem be made to work through my cellphone? I'm thinking of an emergency use, like with the egyptians who have lost internet. The challenge would be connecting the POTS line from the modem to the cellphone's input. (Maybe this cable would work - http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/7830/ [thinkgeek.com]

Not sure if it applies to all Android devices, but my Fascinate has software built int to allow you to use the cellular capability as a modem for the purposes of a data connection. You'd need a dial-up ISP to connect to, but the capability is there.

Re:phone lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

You sort of can though, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_Switched_Data

Re:phone lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

We used to do this back in the day. Couldn't go faster than 9600bps though.

Re:phone lines?

[uglyduckling]

Of course you can send data over a GSM connection, the poster said "can my 56K Dialup modem be made to work through my cellphone", for which the answer is NO. Historically there were ways to send digital data, encoded in analogue, over an analogue cell system, p but the original poster was talking about connection his historic modem to the current cellphone systems.

Re:phone lines?

[mcfedr]

they shutdown the mobile networks as well. if they hadn't most phones with bluetooth will connect to your computer as a dial up or gprs modem

Re:phone lines?

[a.deity]

So I'm guessing we were the two people actually using the IrDA ports on those Nokias. Worked great with my Palm IIIxe and my PowerBook 5300cs.

/. News Network

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

People often don't know about things before they were became mainstream. It's not like AOL was at its advertising height, you know.

(Also, I didn't know that @ meant at until I got my first email address in ~'96.)

Re:/. News Network

[NekSnappa]

Mechanical geeks, and motor heads have know what @ means for years before the Internet.
i.e. 375hp @ 4700rpm
or 335ft/lb @ 5000rpm

those were the good old days

[alen]

like when if you wanted to watch TV you had to wait for the right time for a show to start and you can't pick your episode in case of re-runs

or if you had a game console you had to buy strategy guides if you got stuck. you couldn't just go to youtube and find a walkthrough

or you couldn't carry your phone around with you every you went

or look up prices on products right in the store

Re:those were the good old days

[sznupi]

like when if you wanted to watch TV you had to wait for the right time for a show to start and you can't pick your episode in case of re-runs

Huh? We certainly had VHS... many units even could be set to record something at designated time & date (I once left mine unattended for almost a month, to record successive episodes of ... Sea Quest; ehhh, good old days indeed... but who will build it now that Bridger is dead? ;( )

Re:those were the good old days

[Anrego]

I remember when putting a video on the internet was a _big deal_.

Anyone remember realplayer?

Seriously, say what you will about youtube.. but what it's done for the internet is astounding.

Also wikipedia! Remember when finding information about something took effort! I remember spending hours trunging through a valley of geocities and angelfire pages and a minefield of ads .. now it's just there, and despite critisism, is usually accurate enough for casual purposes.

Re:those were the good old days

[stewbacca]

I think he means you can get any show whenever you want, not the fact you can record one and watch it later. Having VHS didn't eliminate the need to have to wait for a show to start.

Re:those were the good old days

[operagost]

Couldn't program your VCR, eh?

Re:those were the good old days

[MikeDirnt69]

I remember spending hours trunging through a valley of geocities and angelfire pages and a minefield of ads

Pure adventure! The web was still wild and the porn low-res.

Re:those were the good old days

[hduff]

or you couldn't carry your phone around with you every you went

Yes you could. It was the size of a brick and expensive as Hell, but yes you could.

Re:those were the good old days

[Anonymous Coward]

Buffering...........buffering

Re:those were the good old days

[Jason Levine]

VHS was nice, but it got painful to find a tape you were willing to tape over, remember to set the timer and then when watching the show, fast forward past programs other people in your household recorded to get to your shows. (You could have your own tapes, but that meant switching them out between recordings. Not practical if two recordings were close together.)

Re:those were the good old days

[amRadioHed]

Sure a few people could, but the inconvenience and cost made it unavailable to the general population.

Re:those were the good old days

[k6mfw]

like when if you wanted to watch TV you had to wait for the right time for a show to start

but you could watch movies on late night that featured Gina Lollobrigida and Jayne Mansfield.

or you couldn't carry your phone around with you every you went

but you could carry a walkie-talkie and everyone would think you're a govt agent or a narc.

Re:those were the good old days

[Xtifr]

Couldn't program your VCR, eh?

Was there someone who could?

Actually, I had an uncle who was able to program his VCR. Not because he was technically minded (he wasn't), but because he was obsessive-compulsive, and the thought of missing an "important" TV show when he was out of town for some reason was more than he could handle. For the most part, though, the techies I knew didn't care enough about TV to bother to learn how to program their VCRs.

Re:those were the good old days

[mikestew]

Yes you could. It was the size of a brick and expensive as Hell, but yes you could.

The Motorola MicroTACs were far from brick-sized and came out in 1989. You weren't going to fit them in a pants pocket, but they fit in a jacket pocket well enough. Couldn't have been that expensive because I bought two for our consulting business in the early 90s and we weren't exactly using rakes to collect our money.

Re:those were the good old days

[Anonymous Coward]

I ye[Buffering...]s I remem[Buffering...]ber RealP[Buffering...]layer.

Re:those were the good old days

[Macgrrl]

My problem wasn't that I couldn't program my VCR, my problem was that the TV stations didn't stick to their advertised schedules. To record a 1hr program you generally had to set the VCR up to tape from 30 minutes before the advertised start time to 30+ minutes after. If it was advertised to appear immediately after a major sporting event, double the contingency window.

Re:those were the good old days

[sznupi]

Ah but you didn't really have to wait for a show to start, too (plus it's not like times of airing can be ignored now, even with p2p; and when via "legal" routes - from what I hear, getting any random ep whenever you want on Hulu, etc. often has some limits ... not to mention extreme geographic limitation of the service)

Focused on different technologies

[Anonymous Coward]

After a while they start talking about someone going to bed with a fleshlight, and none of them has to ask what that is.

Sigh...

[ak_hepcat]

And at this point, I'd been working on the "Internet" i.e., traditional but including Bitnet, for 7 years.

It's not like it wasn't out there to find. I even had a website online.

Of course, Archie and Veronica were pretty popular alternatives back then. So maybe they just didn't know what to use or where to look...

Re:Sigh...

[timeOday]

They wouldn't have been doing anybody a favor by reporting on Bitnet, gopher, or Archie, since those never did catch on among Today Show viewers.

Very, very little of what now makes the Internet valuable to people existed at that time.

Slashdot initial conversation

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. Slash and Dot? Slash dot dot com? wait... org? I'm so confused!

Wow they're so clueless

[blair1q]

Just like the gork who posted this to /. three days after the entire twitterverse had it...

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[sanosuke001]

/. should delete accounts of people who use the word "twitterverse"

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[outZider]

Here's me, wishing I had mod points.

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[corbettw]

It is pretty sad when /. gets trumped by my idiot cousin and her Facebook wall.

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[pclminion]

Actually, /. should delete the accounts of people who do nothing but look for somewhere else the article has appeared first then bitch about how Slashdot didn't "scoop" it -- as if that's EVER how Slashdot worked.

Some of us aren't on Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever the fuck else you are using to get news. Thankfully we have Slashdot.

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[game kid]

But why? It's perfectly acceptable in the blogosphere!

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[aboniks]

On the other hand, some of the /. readership wouldn't touch twitter with an over-voltage cattle prod, so...

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[glwtta]

It's from fucking 1994, how time-sensitive do you really think that story is?

And yeah, "twitterverse"...

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[blair1q]

We call those people "Luddites", and send them back to their facebook pages.

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[blair1q]

/. should delete accounts of people who think /. should delete the accounts of people for speaking certain words.

Re:Wow they're so clueless

[minus9]

Perhaps we should organise a webinar to explain these modern concepts.

20th Century businesses are still unprepared.

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Corporations that depend on a 20th century business model that assumes that information requires physical media and is therefore scare are still unprepared to deal with the internet.

The "dot"...

[Anonymous Coward]

The "dot" still pisses me off. The way that Mr. Gumbel pronounced the address is the way that I always did, up until about '98 when I finally had to explicitly start sayng "dot" because clueless n3wbs wouldn't understand what I meant w/o it.

It always seemed very natural to me to read an address as "user at example (pause) com". Oh, well...

Re:The "dot"...

[petman]

Well, it's better than pronouncing it as "user AT example FULL STOP com".

Re:Couric & Gumbel aren't any better informed

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Neither is Lauer. Neither is most everyone in the media. Journalism: for those who are too unskilled to do anything else.

Journalists are still a little more useful than American public school teachers.

Spent 1994 teaching teachers

[Vrallis]

In 1994 I was in high school, and I spent the summers of 1994 and 1995 teaching elementary and middle school teachers in my district how to browse the web and use email*. Many of our schools had just obtained net access and newer computers capable of more than just Mavis Beacon and Wordperfect for DOS.

Oddly enough the biggest issue I had in all that time was with the more 'senior' teachers almost all suffering from severe arthritis. Many couldn't grip a mouse well enough to use it effectively, particularly trying to negotiate two mouse buttons. No wonder I could never read what they had written on the blackboards!

*Yep, I worked (for pay) for my own school district while in high school. It definitely helped me pay for a lot of the miscellaneous expenses as I moved away for college (particularly upgrading my computer).

Re:Spent 1994 teaching teachers

[Nadaka]

By '94 I had real internet at home on a 14k modem and my older brother had been dialing BBS's for over a decade on a 300 baud modem.

Re:Spent 1994 teaching teachers

[Vrallis]

Pretty much the same here. I'd been on BBSes for a few years at this point, and had an email address via one of them for a while. By 94 I'd say I'd spent far more time on Usenet than the web though since the web could barely be considered even infantile at that point.

Katie is hotter now than back then

[halfdan the black]

Elizabeth Vargas, yummy also.

Re:Katie is hotter now than back then

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not saying very much. Kouric's haircut in the article is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen.

Re:Katie is hotter now than back then

[Anonymous Coward]

Katie is a stupid skank

Internet is capitalized

[Lord Byron II]

Why are we making fun of people for not knowing what the Internet was 17 years ago when the /. summary doesn't even capitalize it properly?

Re:Internet is capitalized

[pclminion]

Whether to capitalize the word "Internet" is hardly a settled matter. Personally, I don't care if you capitalize it, but if you start arguing about it like it's a big deal, you get put on my list of funny people.

Re:Internet is capitalized

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh. Another case of a clueless and spineless troll citing wikipedia as an argument. Usage determines context in english. As usual, wikipedia is not good reference material as it ignores basic social context in favor of proliferating a set of conflicting ideas as arbitrarily valid. Go out, publish something, cite it, welcome to wikimania. The belief that other people should tell you what is real. Ya, that's a good way to determine the accuracy of information. *eyeroll*

Re:Internet is capitalized

[Anonymous Coward]

It obviously validated the original poster's point that the issue was not settled. Your diatribe completely missed the essential point.

Re:Internet is capitalized

[warGod3]

Capitalization is dependent upon the manual of style in use for that organization.

But really, in this day and age, does it matter? Of course Grammar Nazi's will be ranting and raving over what is the correct way to capitalize "internet", but in the end, does it really matter?

Re:Internet is capitalized

[gfreeman]

Capitalization is dependent upon the manual of style in use for that organization.

But really, in this day and age, does it matter? Of course Grammar Nazis will be ranting and raving over what is the correct way to capitalize "internet", but in the end, does it really matter?

Thank you

Re:Internet is capitalized

[Anonymous Coward]

> It obviously validated the original poster's point that the issue was not settled.

The argument is a non-argument. Note the reference to "the sky". It's arbitrary minutia that A. isn't an issue, B. fails to grasp basic english grammar in favor of some faux controversy.

It seems like you and a couple other sheeple missed the point.

Wall Street

[BitHive]

I was watching Wall Street last night and Gordon Gekko pulls out a portable black and white television about the size of an military field radio and says something to the effect of "See that? It's got a 2 inch screen. I tell you, we're going to a new age, pal!"

Re:Wall Street

[Anonymous Coward]

People with too much money get overly excited about overpriced technology of limited utility. It's just their way of letting you know they have disposable income. (Check out this iPad - it's awesome!)

Re:Couric & Gumbel aren't any better informed

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess. Both groups are part of the same machine designed to produce a supine, dull-witted populace.

Ahhh the memories...

[Sponge Bath]

1994, when you carried around spare bits in a glass jar and calculated bandwidth with a slide rule. I could tell you more, but my Alzheimer's is acting up.

Re:Ahhh the memories...

[benjamindees]

I had a cellphone on my belt, which was the style at the time.

Re:Ahhh the memories...

[aboniks]

You had belts? Luxury.

Whoa, whoa, whoa...

[Stenchwarrior]

You mean...I don't NEED a phone line to access the internet!? I called AOL and they assure me that I do. I think these TV guys don't know what they are talking about.

Re:Whoa, whoa, whoa...

[SnarfQuest]

No man, the innernet is just a bunch of tubes, dude. You go down to Home Depo and ask for the Al Gore special. Make sure you have a good monkey wrench available.

FWIW

[wideBlueSkies]

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

        violence@nbc.ge.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
DNS Error: Domain name not found

----- Original message -----

MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.103.246.22 with SMTP id y13mr9555665mur.76.1296588457799; Tue,
  01 Feb 2011 11:27:37 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.102.211.39 with HTTP; Tue, 1 Feb 2011 11:27:37 -0800 (PST)
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 14:27:37 -0500
Message-ID:
Subject: test email
From: XXXXXXX
To: violence@nbc.ge.com
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001636765baf7278a3049b3d8653

Hello 1994... ;)

Re:FWIW

[kenrblan]

It makes sense that you got a delivery error. NBC is owned by Comcast now. Did you try violence@nbc.comcast.com?

Re:FWIW

[josgeluk]

Did you notice that they even didn't display an @, but instead showed an "A" in a little circle? Apparently, in 1994, not all keyboards had the @ sign.

1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[Animats]

Back in 1983, I was at "jbn@Ford-wdl1.ARPA":

Date: 15-Jul-83 14:03:40-PDT
From: jbn@FORD-WDL1.ARPA
Subject: Outstanding TOPS-20 TCP bug remains in v5.2
To: ICCB@BBN-UNIX.ARPA, Paetzold@DEC-MARLBORO.ARPA, CLynn@BBNA.ARPA, Tappan@BBNA.ARPA<br/>
Cc: MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA

For some months now, we have observed that the BBN TOPS-20 implementation of TCP does not perform the TCP close handshake properly. This problem has been documented and reported to the appropriate people as shown below.

Crispin at SU-SCORE has just installed a new TOPS-20 monitor (5.2) and this outstanding problem has NOT been fixed.

The effect of this problem is that when a system which correctly performs the handshake is talking to a noncomplying TOPS-20, and the TCP close is initiated from the non-TOPS-20 end, the non-TOPS-20 end will hang in the close and eventually time out. This tends to cause STOR operations in FTP to TOPS-20 sites to fail. It also has the annoying property for us that every time we get mail from a TOPS-20 site, our TCP logs a protocol violation.

Larson at SRI has located the defective code in TOPS-20 as shown below. The messages below are the previous ones relating to this problem.

As we at Ford Aerospace do not run any TOPS-20 systems, we do not directly have this problem, but our users who need to communicate with some of the TOPS-20 sites find this a continual annoyance. Because of the former importance of TOPS-20 in the ARPANET community, there has been
an informal tradition that the TOPS-20 implementation has been considered the ``standard'' with which others were expected to interoperate. For this reason, it appears that considerable effort has been expended in some of the newer implementations (such as the 4.2BSD systems) to interoperate with TOPS-20 despite this problem. (Elaborate FTP strategies regarding data connection establishment are a means of getting around this problem).

Other implementors should be aware of this problem so that such wasted effort can be avoided.

John Nagle
Ford Aerospace and Communications Corp.

This was back when Berkeley's TCP implementation was new and barely working. (Yes, kiddies, TCP/IP did not come from Berkeley.) Ever wonder why FTP uses a different data connection port for each transfer? That's how it started.

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[zmughal]

Wait, you're the John Nagle of Nagle's algorithm?

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I was going to post that I'd been on the internet since 1984, which I thought was a long time. It gets exponentially rarer as you go back. The person I know who'd been here the longest was from 1979.

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[lennier]

Back in 1983, I was at "jbn@Ford-wdl1.ARPA...
                              John Nagle
                              Ford Aerospace and Communications Corp

*blinks*

As in this John Nagle?

Er.. hello!

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[Mr Z]

In all likelihood, the TCP connection you used to post that inane comment used John Nagle's algorithm. You sound like the one that needs a diaper change.

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[Mr Z]

That was my immediate response as well. (Insert a joke about bowing with NODELAY here.)

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the coolest posts I've ever read on slashdot.

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[treewojima]

I was going to post something like this before I even realized who the OP was.

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[Dorsch]

Interesting... Apparently people in '83 cared about correct punctuation and spelling!

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see the luminaries out on slashdot. Ladies and Gentlemen, the man who brought you TCP_NODELAY!

Re:1994? I was on the Internet in 1983.

[Master Moose]

Wow! I thought having email back ups to 2004 was being anal. 1983, you win.

leaning how dumbe we are

[Anonymous Coward]

. is dot not period now and @ is at vice Ampersand fuck have we gave up anything more than one syllable?

Re:leaning how dumbe we are

[greghodg]

Uh, no, @ has always been "at".

Re:leaning how dumbe we are

[element-o.p.]

have we gave up anything more than one syllable?

Yes, apparently:

• Spelling (two syllables)
• grammar (two syllables) and
• punctuation (four syllables)

Word 6 spell check.

[LaminatorX]

In 1994, Word 6 didn't know the word, "Internet." It suggested, "internment."

(Jokes about being held captive by Word are left as an exercise to the reader.)

Re:Word 6 spell check.

[spongman]

in 1994, the Internet at Microsoft was a shell account on a Xenix box called 'wingate' you could telnet into then telnet/ftp from there. there was a directory on it that was shared internally over IPX (IP wasn't routed back then) so you could copy files back to your machine. they also had a couple of nntp servers. an unofficial PPPoE connnection showed up hosted by the NT networking team, but the service was spotty...

It would be funny

[mrstrano]

to ask people now and see what they think the Internet is.

Re:It would be funny

[Stenchwarrior]

It's Facebook, Twitter and boobies...right?

Re:It would be funny

[betterunixthanunix]

I believe Google did something similar as a publicity stunt, asking people in Times Square which browser they used. Most people could not answer.

The extruded dingus!

[Matey-O]

Board Member 1: What if you tire before it's done?
Board Member 2: Does it have rules?
Board Member 3: Can more than one play?
Board Member 4: What makes you think it's a game?
Board Member 3: Is it a game?
Board Member 5: Will it break?
Board Member 6: It better break eventually!
Board Member 2: Is there an object?
Board Member 1: What if you tire before it's done?
Board Member 5: Does it come with batteries?
Board Member 4: We could charge extra for them.
Board Member 7: Is it safe for toddlers?
Board Member 3: How can you tell when you're finished?
Board Member 2: How do you make it stop?
Board Member 6: Is that a boy's model?
Board Member 3: Can a parent assemble it?
Board Member 5: Is there a larger model for the obese?
Board Member 1: What if you tire before it's done?
Board Member 8: What the hell is it?

Re:The extruded dingus!

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, for kids!

Geez...

[Anonymous Coward]

How many more sites must I see this clip posted on? ENOUGH ALREADY!

Geek

[Quiet_Desperation]

Not to mention all that computery stuff was, eeewwwwww, the province of geeks and nerds! Eew eww eww! The two of them could have just completed a three week course giving a concise yet detailed overview of the Internet and they would never admit to it. Little Katie could never face her Delta Delta Delta sisters again if she admitted computer knowledge. Besides, they were millionaires even then. WTF did they care?

Internet circa 1994

[jkeelsnc]

Why were they this clueless? The internet was already beginning to take off. At the college i was at in 1993-1994 a lot of people were already logging onto the internet and learning the graces of pine, gopher, telnet, and FTP. I mean it wasn't very sophisticated but it wasn't new! A significant number of students were already there. In fact, I remember logging in to chat with people and use forums on ISCA which some of you may remember at the Univ of Iowa. It was a fairly popular BBS online at the time it seemed. I do remember mentioning to other people including some students of the era what the "information superhighway" was going to mean and many acted like idiots. "Why would I want that?" "Well, that's just stupid. No one will want that" Etc. Pure negativity which is a pretty American way to respond to something new they don't understand. Anyway, they have their foot in their mouth today.

Re:Internet circa 1994

[amRadioHed]

In case you didn't notice, the hosts of the Today show weren't college students back then. Many students had access at their schools, but that doesn't mean they or most other people had access at home.

Re:Internet circa 1994

[westlake]

At the college i was at in 1993-1994 a lot of people were already logging onto the internet and learning the graces of pine, gopher, telnet, and FTP.

You were using the college's facilities - not being billed by the hour - plus surcharges for the regional or long distance call.

AOl was wildly successful because it insulated users from the complexites of e-mail clients, file compression, IRC, etc., - and second because it tamed the cost of going on-line to an affordable and predictable monthly bill.

 

In typical Slashdot form

[sunking2]

It only took 17 years for slashdot to pick up this story.

Re:In typical Slashdot form

[medv4380]

Is Slashdot even that old?

Re:In typical Slashdot form

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

No. Slashdot is about 11 years old. They had a big bash about it turning 10 last year.

Re:In typical Slashdot form

[Jason Levine]

Don't worry. The Dupe will appear in only 8 more years.

Re:In typical Slashdot form

[Wyatt Earp]

Slashdot went up in September of '97, I came across it at the end of September or early October '97. Back when the tag line was Chips and Dips and then pretty soon it turned in News for Nerds, etc and so forth.

I think Hemos and CmdrTaco were in Wired in the spring of '98 after /. got big with the post Columbine traffic and Jon Katz being here.

Re:In typical Slashdot form

[PCM2]

For some unknown reason, while I was reading your post all I could think of was Waldorf and Statler's song from the opening of The Muppet Show. Strange.

Re:In typical Slashdot form

[PCM2]

For some unknown reason, all I could think of while reading your post was Waldorf and Statler's song from the opening of The Muppet Show. Strange.

Re:In typical Slashdot form

[Luyseyal]

Yep. Wish they hadn't lost all their archives. BTW, Columbine was apparently 4/20/1999, though I always think it was 1998, too. (Thanks to Wikipedia for clearing that up for me). The Waybackmachine is helpful for reminiscing but only goes so far...

I could've had a sub-1000 user account. I just didn't think they'd catch on at them time. Heh.
-l

Re:In typical Slashdot form

[Anonymous Coward]

er, slashdot didn't even exist in 1994...

*please let this be a successfull troll and someone wooosh me*

Man: I thought I was an "oldster" around here...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Back in 1983, I was at "jbn@Ford-wdl1.ARPA":" - by Animats (122034) on Tuesday February 01, 02:31PM (#35071338) Homepage

See subject-line. No insult intended, but, you're "showing your age" here with your reply (which is fine/ok & all that).

I was a senior in highschool, & I was using the public internet myself (doing BASIC programming to some DEC systems we "talked to" via the 'oldschool wargames-type' bootjack & modem that looked like a landline phone handle stuck into suction cups!), but I was only a young kid then...

Thus, your reply tells me that you're older than I, & with myself @ 45 yrs. of age as of yesterday, & you apparently already "on the job" while I was still in highschool, tells me you're my "senior" in age here.

APK

P.S.=> No biggie, just an observation on the age bit... but, I was there online myself, but I didn't know SQUAT about networking back then (& I mean ZERO understanding at that point @ least), as I was only JUST beginning to start doing programming via a timeshare system to a remote system on slave terminals that were "online"... apk

John Boehner: Solved

[monoqlith]

I was wondering where John Boehner got that orange hue. It turns out he's been in 1994 this entire time.

Re:John Boehner: Solved

[RPoet]

As an Orange-American, I find that highly offensive.

Re:John Boehner: Solved

[kenrblan]

When he claimed that he didn't use artificial tanning products on 60 Minutes, I came to the conclusion that he bathes in Cheetos.

Re:John Boehner: Solved

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Orange-American, I resemble that remark.

Re:John Boehner: Solved

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Orange-American

So, how's things in New Jersey?

this shows the ignorance of us tv anchors

[Anonymous Coward]

it just shows the endemic ignorance of tv anchors in the us

@ means about? FAIL.

[kimvette]

I remember even from grammar school that @ is the "commercial at" and is shorthand for "at"

Like, 3 @ 50(imagine the cent sign here - & cent ; does not render on /.)

Re:@ means about? FAIL.

[Thud457]

that's real efficient, one character to save two.
stupid cavemen.

Re:@ means about? FAIL.

[kimvette]

It is more efficient, especially when given small labels and a monospace font in a label maker. Of course, they could probably do the word "at" oriented 90 degrees relative to the rest of the price

Re:Credit Cards!

[TaoPhoenix]

Unfortunately, calculating the interest on a credit card is not basic!

Take a deep breath, here we go!

"Interest" is a fee. "Fees" are also fees. So let's group all the fees. $29 account fee + 0%*(4/12) aka 90 day interest free promo + (17.5%*(1/12)PerMonth compounded for 8 months) - (1% 'cash back' on purchases per actual interest month rolled into the compounding) + UnTouchable Amount that triggers credit score penalty for "too close to limit" as effective hidden fee + %expected risk of penalty rate of 23% for missing payment +%expected risk for credit limit reduction on OTHER cards at the same bank because of a late payment on the card ...

Why bother. Just know they're evil, and save like hell to pay it off.

h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[loshwomp]

The worst was the first few awkward years where everyone on TV or radio pronounced the "http://" as "h-t-t-p colon slash slash" every time they read a URL out loud. I do not miss those days.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[RPoet]

Even today, people force themselves through the painful pronunciation of "double you double you double you dot" when it's completely unnecessary for almost all sites.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[Kozz]

The worst was the first few awkward years where everyone on TV or radio pronounced the "http://" as "h-t-t-p colon slash slash" every time they read a URL out loud. I do not miss those days.

... but I've heard somewhere that every time someone pronounces "/" as "backslash", God kills a kitten.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[Anonymous Coward]

Until recently the "www." was pronounced as well.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[rimugu]

You may be young and not be aware that are other things besides http.
Back in the day ftp, telnet, gopher, where common stuff, you had to specify to avoid confusion.
Right now," www" is not even necessary in most of the case.
Have you ever wondered why this site has the name it has? It is because of the slash slash and the dot (in those days there were more .edu and .org than .com assuming .com was not your first assumption)

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[wideBlueSkies]

Sadly some still do this.....

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[Anonymous Coward]

Or when everyone on TV read the slash in URLs as 'backslash'! Oh wait...that still happens.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[517714]

Half of the browsers and/or DNS's required that the URL be entered in its entirety. Few users would know why they couldn't get to the desired website if they failed to enter the full address.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[loshwomp]

You may be young and not be aware that are other things besides http.

Oh, I'm plenty aware of that, but in the late 90s when this was going on, none of the above mattered. The announcers read the URLs out with painful completeness because they themselves did not even understand what they were reading--people actually using the web understood perfectly well how to use their browsers.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[Opyros]

It's rather a shame the English language dropped the letter wynn centuries ago (although it did look a bit too much like a "p"); "wynn wynn wynn" would be much easier to say!

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[Ferzerp]

The hijacking of DNS by webservers is particularly frustrating for those of us running networks for other purposes. I say stick with the www so that I stop getting requests to have internal websites' IP addresses resolve to the domain name of an AD domain, etc. Yes, technically I can make this work by running a web service on all of my domain controllers that redirects to www.[domain]. No, it won't happen.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[lennier]

The worst was the first few awkward years where everyone on TV or radio pronounced the "http://" as "h-t-t-p colon slash slash" every time they read a URL out loud. I do not miss those days.

How else do you pronounce http:/// so it doesn't sound like you have a bad case of the hiccups?

I mean, other than just omitting it, but then good luck when you have to read out an rtsp:// or ftp:// url.

Re:h-t-t-p colon slash slash

[loshwomp]

I mean, other than just omitting it, but then good luck when you have to read out an rtsp:// or ftp:// url.

Yeah, good point, because they sure were reading out FTP URLs all the time back in the 90s.

Re:Credit Cards!

[c6gunner]

Why bother. Just know they're evil, and save like hell to pay it off.

I prefer the "don't spend more than your next paycheck will cover - otherwise, get a line of interest" approach. Haven't paid a penny in interest on any of my CC's in roughly 7 years now.

IT Crowd's "Elders of the internet" is classic!

[keneng]

I prefer this definition of the internet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

Text search "elders" and "internet" and you'll find the funny parts:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd

It's hilarious. Must see.

They're not doing so bad for January 1994

[ChrisCampbell47]

January 1994 actually WAS kind of early to understand the internet. I myself only caught on to it in summer 1993, with Mosaic running on Suns and Macs in the Georgia Tech computer labs. I could rock command-line FTP though.

Yes yes, some of you all had internet access / addresses well before then, and hooray for you. But in Jan 1994 it was still extremely new for average mainstream folks, like people who watch (and host) major network morning news shows.

Give the perma-snark a rest. And you kids get off my lawn!

Re:They're not doing so bad for January 1994

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, really. I consider this "cluelessness", for lack of a better word, to be accurate of most non-geek adults back in 1994. Just because you're an old fart scientist or engineer who was on ARPAnet 7000 years ago doesn't make these TV hosts idiots.

Re:They're not doing so bad for January 1994

[Anonymous Coward]

1994 early?!? Youngster! I was browsing the Usenet news groups on Ga Tech's unix boxes in 1987...

The joys of the Rich building computer labs.

Re:They're not doing so bad for January 1994

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't remember exactly when I started using the Internet, but my first email address was rice@uunet.uu.net, accessed via a uucp connection from work to a server at Sun. I believe this was around 1991. Since we lacked direct telnet and ftp capabilities over uucp, I became quite good at ftpmail and uuencode / uudecode loops. By 1994 I had home access - my old phone list shows two dialup numbers for Chrysalis, my local ISP - one for 2400 baud, the other for 9600 baud.

Dang, you got me reminiscing. Wanna hear about the processor I soldered together out of TTL as a senior project? :-D

Re:They're not doing so bad for January 1994

[gpburdell]

Ah, the Rich Building (for us GT people)

Back in 1994, I was rocking my 9600 baud modem, now it is a 20 MB connection that is wireless throughout my home, work, and my car and person if you include my cell data plan.

Back in 1994, we fingered, now we poke

Back in 1994, the world was my oyster as I was studying to be a computer engineer, now my job is being out sourced as fast my 20 MB connection. It is a shame I had to go non-technical to survive.

Re:They're not doing so bad for January 1994

[quacking duck]

And let's not forget that Microsoft and Bill Gates, father of all modern computing (/sarcasm), missed the internet's true significance and didn't direct Microsoft's energy towards it until almost two full years after this show aired. The Road Ahead, published late 1995, declared the internet the precursor to the information highway, rather than the highway itself.

Re:They're not doing so bad for January 1994

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah, I got my first internet access in 1997... Though I was aware it existed earlier, because some of the games I exchanged with friends had "demos" from Sweden or Norway and as we obviously knew no one there, it meant someone managed to get them using a phone line.

Answer...

[antdude]

It is a series of tubes! :P

I recall a book from 1994

[objekt]

It was called "The Internet Directory" or something like that, and was nothing but a list of Usenet newsgroups. That's exactly what some people thought it was.

Looking quite ... healthy

[gilgongo]

I don't know exactly why I get this impression, but was the guy on the sofa wearing the worst fake tan in all of human history?

Superiority attained by hindsight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Superiority attained by hindsight.

Internet early days!

[k6mfw]

I remember those early days... using Mosaic and seeing that S shaped icon do it's thing when downloading a webpage. A couple years ago I found the university (can't recall the name right now) site and they still had Mosaic available for download. I ran it on my Mac G3 using OS9 with dialup. It loaded yahoo.com really fast, I guess it ignored all the javascript. I gotta try it again just to see what happens.

I also remember finding a webpage that showed a "live" still shot of a coffee maker of a MIT student had in his dorm and also showed temperature of the coffee. Updates are done by refreshing the window (I think Mosaic called it something else). Though no big deal these days but back then that was something to impress your friends.

I heard some story of a coke machine that was put on the internet so it can be checked for number of soda cans, apparently it suffered one of the first "slashdotted" events when all kinds of people would surf to this coke machine.

This was back when it was called The Information Super Highway. And this one guy was "surfing the web" and "he traveled to and got stuck in a toaster in Iowa."

Re:Couric & Gumbel aren't any better informed

[reboot246]

That's what I was thinking, too. That show, as silly as it was, was probably Gumbel and Couric's high point. They've only gone downhill since.

I've often wondered if Lauer hires someone to tie his shoes in the morning. What an idiot!

This is before Al Gore invented the Internet

[s.whiplash]

Remember, this is before Al Gore created the internet. So no one knew what was going on.

We're all learning everyday

[ddizzle]

Ahh... the early to mid 90's. I was doing work with Solaris and this thing called Linux which was still in it's infancy. Here's a post from those days trying to figure out a printing problem. It's kinda embarrassing that I refered to it as Linux 1.2.3 instead of Slackware 2.2.0, but hopefully, we were all more ignorant 17 years ago than we are now.

before the gold rush

[wordsnyc]

In 1995 I was circulating a book proposal to publishers for a directory of literary resources on the web (it became The Book Lover's Guide to the Internet). Even then, most editors had only a dim sense of what it was all about, and Random House finally went for it only because the editor who read the proposal was in her 20s (and smart). But the publisher insisted I spend the first half of the book giving readers a crash course in how everything on the net worked then, including usenet and gopher, and how to get there (AOL, Prodigy, CS, etc.).

The market was ripe -- the book took off, was excerpted in the Washington Post and got me on c-span, but the publishers had been afraid to print a large initial run and ran out of books a month before Christmas.

forgive their confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and the @ sign was there long before the Internet. Where do they get these people?

Note the symbol shown wasn't the "@" sign - it was a lowercase "a" with a circle around it:

No wonder Couric thought it meant "around" instead of "at".

I think everyone's confusion here can be forgiven

In 1981...

[Dubious Maximus]

...back when "Late Night With David Letterman" first came on the air after his morning show was cancelled, he started doing Johnny Carson's "Stump the band" bit again. In a very early broadcast, he asked the audience member whose turn was next what he did for a living.

The contestant replied: "I'm a software engineer".

Letterman looked bewildered, turned to the crowd and said: "Software Engineer? Does that mean anything to anybody here?"

Even when the fellow tried to explain it, it didn't seem to register with anyone, least of all Letterman.

And that was a mere 13 years earlier.

I dunno

[Falconhell]

What came first the chicken or the egg?

Re:Man: I thought I was an "oldster" around here..

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, who cares that he's older than you. Stop trying to kiss up.

We know he's less insane than you.

What Next?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is rather remarkable to look back only 17 years to see how much has changed.

Maybe in another 17 years we'll have a better way of capturing video for YouTube clips than holding a video camera to a TV screen.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes, what we take for granted now was new in the past. Who cares.

What the HELL is going on with that guy in the midde? He's Orange. I don't mean he's got a bad tan, or the pictures bad. He's orange.

I can understand and accept that things which are very common now weren't widely known back in the past, that's normal. But I absoloutely refuse to believe that only 17 years ago it was acceptable to appear luminous orange on TV. I can't, I just can't.

Why did they ruin teh funny?

[R.Mo_Robert]

The headline might actually be funny if they mimicked the hosts' usage: "Can you explain what Internet is?" That's half of what made this video so funny in the first place! (Note the lack of "the." They practically mentioned everything else, like confusion with "@" and no "dot"-mentioning in ".com.")

Agree with others

[Anonymous Coward]

January 1994? Give them some slack. Granted I was at a university in a small media market at the time, and wasn't involved in comp-sci at the time either, but I don't think I heard about the web until summer '94. Of course I had used the internet in other ways before then ( gopher, e-mail, NNTP, FTP and IRC ), but none of that was considered game changing.

Re:Couric & Gumbel aren't any better informed

[bughunter]

Message to broadcast journalists: Don't sit around trying to sound and look authoritative when talking about something you don't know Jack about. It makes you look like an idiot 16 years later when the average 1st grader knows more than you did then.

It just reinforces every other experience I've had when I've seen what journalists do to "facts" about which I have separate, objective knowledge: they ALWAYS get something wrong. Often, something important. And the culprit is always either lack of attention to detail, or a rush to understanding/judgment (or both).

It makes me watch the news in a new light. I never believe anything I read/see in the news anymore, after seeing how frequently they get their 'facts' wrong.

Bailing hay

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird farm ya got there.

It was hard to get on the net in 1994

[dbIII]

1994? In 1994 I enrolled in a part time undergraduate degree in computer science partly motivated by being able to get internet access as a student. In my area internet access was not available to the general public at any price and the Institute of Engineers Australia BBS was just not quite the same thing. The truly annoying thing is that year policy was changed and first year students were denied internet access.
Hardly anybody took the internet seriously in 1994. Oddly enough the old manipulative bastard that a lot of people call a technological dinosaur, Rupert Murdoch, already owned an ISP in 1994.

Re:Man: I thought I was an "oldster" around here..

[dbIII]

If he knew John Nagle or IS John Nagle that is enough of a reason to be impressed if you know anything about TCP/IP networking.

"and it's a wonderful reminder of how unprepared"

[unity100]

yes its wonderful how unprepared everyone was. media, corporations, governments.

that is exactly why internet has developed freely and became what it is now today. else, they would turn it into a cable tv clone right at the start.

I remember seeing this!

[weeboo0104]

I was in college at the time as a music major. I had just started to get interested in the Internet due to the fact that I could search for almost anything by telneting to other Universities and NASA.
My thought when I saw it on the TV was "duh, isn't it just the next ARPAnet?"

When people started talking about this newfangled thing about the same time, called the World Wide Web, I thought "Why can't I telnet to the web? Sounds like something I should Gopher."

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I am 26 and have been using the internet since before the birth of the world wide web. I recall in first grade when I connected to a dial-in astronomy BBS. It all truly seemed like magic to me then, and it's been a helluva ride. I remember seeing this very clip and many others like it over the course of many years and having a chu

I find it funny that my whole life I was treated like a hideous nerd for my interest in computers and their potential up until very recently. Five or six years ago I would tell people that I was a web developer and they'd assume that I was either unemployed or a deadbeat and now I'm practically treated like a celebrity.

This article waxes poetic about the profound effect the internet has had on humanity, and I say all of it is an understatement. It is our greatest accomplishment to date and our legacy as a species. It has pushed the human mind forward by untold amounts and given the people a measure of freedom that has never before been possible.

They're still doing it

[tchdab1]

Those same people - highly paid network "newscasters" or journalists - are just barely over treating bloggers as troglodyte threats to their profession (yet they constantly appear under-informed and over-impressed with themselves and their status).
Today on NPR there was a story about how thoroughly difficult, nearly impossible, it would be to shut down the internet in the USA as it was shut down in Egypt recently, like the backbone ran by itself or something.

This is not a humorous look back at the first glimpse of a new technology, it is a revealing story that shows us that the people that many have relied on to tell them how the world works actually know very little for all their huge salaries, celebrity status, and elite access. That's the real story here.

Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

They could have just researched it on the internet before hand....

I did not know that, but I respect it

[Anonymous Coward]

"If he knew John Nagle or IS John Nagle that is enough of a reason to be impressed if you know anything about TCP/IP networking." - by dbIII (701233) on Tuesday February 01, @09:58PM (#35076074)

I didn't know that, & it's quite refreshing to learn actually!

Also - I was merely commenting that he's even older than I, and I strongly suspect I am probably one of the older folks that frequent this websites' forums is all (and, he is my senior, no questions asked).

In any event? Well - I respect what he's done now that I know about it!

(Mainly because he's not some "armchair QB critic" type online, and he's done something of note in the art & sciences of computing. Pretty cool actually to find this out really...)

APK

P.S.=> There are some "notables" in this field that post here, and it appears Mr. Nagle's one of them for his contributions to the IP stacks out there etc./et al as was noted in his email and the Nagle algorithm (these are truly the big accomplishments imo - making "better engines").

I've also seen the likes of John Carmack (IDSoftware fame) post here also, & he's legendary!

I also even get the chance to speak to Microsoft mgt. figures here as well (such as Foredecker, VP of the "Microsoft Windows Client Performance Division", whom I have spoken to here before in regards to HOSTS file formats -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1976158&cid=35078976 ).

Folks like those that come here? Hey - it's one of the reasons I post here in fact!

(In order to be able to "interface" with people of that ilk! The opportunity to gain & learn by their experience is there is why... & there is NOTHING as good as "the voice of experience", imo)... apk

Understatement?

[danmart1]

I wouldn't call that an understatement. It was probably the most accurate statement in the whole piece. He was 100% correct although looking back on it from 2011 it seemsa bit nieve. I doubt anyone at that time could have imagined all that it is now. Even the most optimistic internet researcher would have laughed at the concept of me writing this on my phone and having people all around the would read it in a matter of seconds, but that is how far it has come. In another 17 years we will all be able to look back and say the same about whatever new technology we have then. It is the way of the human race.