Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Huh?
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.
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.
Very, very little of what now makes the Internet valuable to people existed at that time.
It obviously validated the original poster's point that the issue was not settled. Your diatribe completely missed the essential point.
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.
Program Intellivision!