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?

[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.

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

[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:Wow they're so clueless

[sanosuke001]

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

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.

In typical Slashdot form

[sunking2]

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

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!