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Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?
jfruh writes "An amazing pair of videos from the AT&T archives tout a service called Viewtron that brought much of what we expect from the modern Internet to customers' homes in 1983. Online news, banking services, restaurant reviews, shopping, e-mail — all were available on your TV set, controlled by a wireless infrared keyboard. The system had 15,000 customers in cities on the U.S. east coast, but was shut down after $50 million was spent on it. But why did it flop? Was the world just not ready for it?"
I didnt see it so i'm asking... was it a walled garden with adverts?
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Probably because it was ridiculously limited by Internet standards. The Internet took off because you could do pretty much anything with it. The only limits were the technology of the computers and connections, and that technology increased and continues to increase exponentially. The services that AT&T offered were simply not worth the expense. The Internet, when it was eventually privatized, was.
nobody had a computer at home
tubes weren't big enough back then!
Enough said.
It had a high initial equipment investment, was slow (painfully slow), didn't look all that good compared to actual TV, had hourly charges, and very limited content. Users couldn't make their own content. The service was only for consumption. By the time the internet really took off, in the mid 90's, speeds were faster, the images were good, and there was a lot more content to peruse. What really let the internet take off was the fact that people could easily create their own content.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
The internet just doesn't work as well with TVs as it does with PC's. Look at internet-connected smart TVs today. A recent study says that 50% of them are never connected to the internet. I think it's because people don't want to "do things" with their TVs. They just want to sit back and watch. PCs and more recently smartphones are associated with doing things. People saw the PC with a keyboard and associated it with getting stuff done. The internet was an instrument to get more stuff done faster and with people/businesses who don't reside in the same town you do. People have used phones to get things done, coordinate with people, call their banks, etc. People only associate TVs with sitting back and watching. Back then the internet wasn't fast enough to do this, so people weren't interested with connected TVs (and apparently 50% of people with internet capable TVs still aren't interested in connected TVs).
People were too caught up in the change from roller-boogie to break-dancing. It happened to me.
dull-eyed footstool-temporary octopus
"Write Mail (10 Cents Per Message"
I think that pretty much explains it all.
They didn't send every single person on earth an AOL CD twenty times. They never had a chance...
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/history/viewtron.htm
At launch, they cost $900 and were reduced to $600 when demand was soft. Further, a subscription in Miami cost $12 a month, plus long distance phone charges, if any. There also were additional charges for Hallmark Cards (electronic mail) of $2 per card or 50 cents for stationery. After May, 1984, the partners gave up trying to sell the Sceptre Terminals and changed the pricing system to be $39.95 a month including terminal rental.
Too goddamned expensive. $900 in 1983 was $2,080 in 2012 dollars.
Who the hell is willing to throw down $2000 for an untested system? Maybe if they'd started at $39.95 a month ($92.37 in 2012 dollars) it would've been able to get off the ground, but the original price point likely killed it.
well we folks using the Commodore Amiga were using all the internet had to offer back then!
* proprietary at&t
* not the internet
* built with profits in mind (not info sharing, openness)
* proprietary at&t
* on low-res analog tv
* on dialup (300 baud anyone?)
* did i mention, proprietary at&t?
There was Minitel in France, and Prestel in the UK, that had some success.
No porn. 'nuff said.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I hate to say this. But I think it is PORN that help the internet fly.
If you were online in 1983, a BBS was the place to be. FidoNet was founded in 1984, so it was the dawn of an exciting era.
So yeah, "world wasn't ready"
Exactly. People don't love the Internet because it's a glorified interactive TV or a fancy product catalog. It's a completely different communications platform, where you can do pretty much whatever you want.
There was no self-publishing, it was not a platform, not an infrastructure, it was a centralized service that didn't interact with similar services from competitors.
Connect-from-home services like these popped up *all the time* in the 70s, 80s and early 90s from cable companies, newspapers, telcos and similar -- but they all died because they were all walled gardens designed to keep out the competitors of their parent companies.
The only services that thrived were the ones that had no parent companies with business models to protect -- AOL and Compuserve -- which died off when they connected themselves to the government/academic internet thingy and real competition started.
What's interesting is how many of these walled gardens evolved from voice-based IVR systems hosted by major newspapers in the 70s-90s where you could dial up and listen to your horroscope, sports, movie showtimes, etc. over the phone. Those systems got more and more and more complex over time, and if you carried a wallet-card of numbers and keypad commands, you could access a world of information from payphones or borrowed landlines while you were on the go! For a small monthly fee, you could get a voicemail box that you could check while you were on the go if you wanted to stay reachable but couldn't afford a pager.
Yep. I started using the internet in the mid-1990's when it had a few years on it but still wasn't quite universal like it is now. When one of the teachers at school was showing this cool new technology they were even describing all the now long forgotten things like Gopher and Finger. The main thing I saw that kicked off widespread usage was simple: "unlimited" usage policies.
Nobody really was interested when you paid for an AOL account and got 5 hours online. They weren't interested when they bumped that up to 20, 40, nor 80. People really didn't seem to bother much until they were told "Here, use this all you want.". Having the average price of a dial-up account fall from $30-40 down to $10-15 per month certainly didn't hurt either.
Its kinda funny though that now that as a society we're hooked, it's trending in the opposite direction. A cellular data plan is typically $30+ and has limits that you can actually hit pretty easily with normal usage patterns.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I think it reveals the American oligarchy's ideal media. It's true that in the mean time they've figured out that a bit of user content allows for all sorts of targeted advertising -- not to mention free content. Otherwise, it sounds more or less like the near future of the internet.
no porn.
Geeks were enthused enough to look past the crappy resolution you got from TVs of that era. I wager most people weren't. Also, if it didn't somehow leverage the power of the computer you already had then it would have been expensive. ATT would have had to write software for all the popular home computers. At that point Atari, Apple and Commodore were powerhouses in the market along with a lot of other niche machines. The market and the tech just weren't ready.
Like many, I took the Internet for granted as a geek-only thing and was surprised when it caught on with the general public in the mid-90's. One explanation I've heard for its sudden adoption is that the web brought pictures to the Internet for the first time. And the 100x100 3-bit Wizard and the Princess graphics shown in this Viewtron don't count.
They were the most popular online service although there may have been one or two others. If you had a Commodore 64, an Apple IIe, or any of the various computers of the day, and you had a modem, you were good to go. It was expensive though, and relatively few people were on it, but it was pretty cool at the time.
There were dozens of similar systems all over the world. Everything from Viatel and Minitel and even AOL and Compuserve.
The problem with all of them was they were closed systems (walled gardens).
People hated being locked into closed systems
It wasn't even new on AT&T. France had Minitel in 1982. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
These systems were neat, sure. Were they the internet? No. Noooo---ooo. No.
Well, there's no crime in that! It's your right as an American. I'm trying to cut down, myself.
No, world was. Tech wasn't.
It takes time for ideas to catch on and really come into their own. All the various precursors to the internet were necessary steps in the process of delivering what we have today. I suppose it all started with television in a way. Call it what you will, but isn't that pretty much what we're all sitting in front of right now?
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
because they tried to take a home entertainment device where people sit together and relax doing nothing, and they incorporated business activities where people needed to ignore each other and dedicate their focus to something requiring their interaction.
that's what a desk is for. and it's better for that reason. that's why monitor's are better than televisions. so until humans choose to work from their couch, you can't give them a keyboard for it.
tell me, what's the correct ergonomic seating position for a keyboard and couch?
Amateur programmers couldn't run and test their own code on it.
If nascent code monkeys weren't interested, then you lose the wow factor pretty quickly.
GEnie, Compuserve, Applelink, and AOL had some success because they were 1/2 BBS-like and 1/2 virtual desktop publishing.
One look at Mosaic + HTML, though, and it was painfully obvious that not only could you publish your random crap without AOL, but you could spend an eternity tinkering and extending it.
Yes, the cell carriers will have a disruptive change hit them at some point, though. Their pricing is exorbitant and can't be sustained.
== Just my opinion(s)
Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?
Viewtron was just another America Online, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc (but even worse, because it was also hardware based). A proprietary walled garden of content that nickel and dimed users to death, with very limited selection, slow performance, and expensive hardware. Take the banking for example. How many banks do you think were plugged into their service? I bet it was only one, and that was more for bragging rights and an advertising tic mark than anything else. 10 cents to send an email? Not exactly going to foster an explosive growth of online communication that way.
Here's why the Internet "won", and this service and the others I listed that were like it have gone the way of the dodo. The internet is open. It is open standards, on top of more open standards, on top of even more open standards. It wasn't built for consumers. It wasn't built for money grubbing corporations to rule over. First and foremost it was built to move data between any two computers on a network that could grow to fast proportions. THAT is why it is a success. I was fortunate to have been on the internet before the www, back when usenet, email, ftp, irc and gopher were king. Even before the glitz and glamor of HTML and the internet that the world knows now, the power of the internet was abundantly clear, even though the learning curve and interface weren't conducive to the average person (ahhh, the days of ftping pirated Amiga software from college servers).
Viewtron put the cart in front of the horse - it was meant to make money and grant control to a single corporate entity. It was not about open networking and raw connectivity between computing devices. That is "Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983".
Better known as 318230.
It looks like they had many of the practical uses spot on. These two statements, however turned out quite wrong.
1) This may look like something out of the 25th century...
2) It all adds up to more time to enjoy live, and more life to enjoy.
Viewtron failed because all of the content on the network was created for commercial purposes.
the internet succeeded where Viewtron failed because in the early days most of the content on the open internet was created by users of the network, not by commercial interests seeking to monetize it.
No matter how large or dedicated a corporation is to producing content, their efforts will always be dwarfed by masses of individuals who produced simply for the love of producing it. It was his large volume of genuine content that attracted the first consumer-only internet users in the early 1990s.
Commercial content of course has its place, but human beings are remarkably good at detecting and disregarding propaganda. Sadly much commercial content falls into this category, and if that is all that is available people will just turn it off.
The people that made the internet viable early on were people who both understood what the network could provide and wanted it.
Those of us who spent our nights dialing between BBSes and trading phone numbers were waiting in the shadows for something more connected. Once the internet became more available (i.e. not just military or universities) climbed on board as soon as we could. It is this kind of group that made the network valuable. This Viewtron system was very closed and controlled. As a user you had access to commercial stuff, but nothing shared between users other than email. The one major thing it missed was porn -- 20/20.
Otherwise it is a barely usable brick targeted to people who don't care anyway. It's a certain flop. No surprise.
It is interesting how forward thinking it was though. 15000 people is quite a few, but only 1/1000th of what was needed to recover costs.
We had something very similar here in Ottawa, Ontario. It was called NABU and consisted of a Z80-based computer hooked into the cable TV network. I remember it had quite a few (crappy) games and what we would today call cloud apps, since the base unit had no local storage, everything happened server-side. I remember it being pretty friggin cool at the time, compared to the 2400 baud modem I had on my Atari, but limited availability and lack of updates prevented it from taking off. It lasted only a few years before the cableco killed it due to poor adoption, which itself was due to the cableco doing a half-assed job of implementing and maintaining the system.
It was ahead of its time, only because the company didn't know how to market and support it.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Hear hear. The real value of Internet is that all the stories, art etc. that people create and used to hide in their desk drawers is now available online. Sturgeon's law still holds, of course, but so does the law of lots of monkeys on typewriters. Commercial content is just a nice bonus.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You don't even have to look anything up to know that it would have been WAY too expensive, and slow at the time, with probably limited content.
Now we have this pitiful substitute for social interaction.
Because (a) virtually no one had computers, (b) home internet access was near impossible to get...
Really silly question, isn't it? A niche device was made that only worked in certain areas, for an infrastructure that existed near anywhere - with a price point (for if it were to be "consumerized") that nearly no one could have afforded. The time wasn't right.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
A fun story! In the UK, domestic customers used AOL and Compuserve to access the internet through a gateway. You could buy modem packs at Tandy. We had Prestel that had an email gateway too. People in academic and military institutions could access the internet at work. The problem then? (1) it was VERY expensive to use UK telephones for this long, (2) phone lines were unreliable and slow (3) and there was hardly any content available.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I wrote the following article during my tenure as the chief architect for the mass-market videotex experiment conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder News called "Viewtron" -- a service of the joint-venture company, Viewdata Corporation of America.
As can be sensed in the article, I had encountered some fairly frustrating situations and was about to be told by the corporate authorities that my telecomputing architecture, which would have provided a dynamically downloaded Forth graphics protocol in 1983 evolving into a distributed Smalltalk-like environment beginning around 1985, would be abandoned due to a corporate commitment to stick with Tandem Computers as the mainframe vendor -- a choice which I had asserted would not be adequate for my architecture. (At least Postscript survived.) I was subsequently offered the head telecomputing software position at Prodigy by IBM and turned it down when they indicated they would not support my architecture either, due to a committment to limit merchant access to their network to only those who had a special status with the service provider (IBM/CBS/Sears). The distributed Smalltalk system was specifically designed to allow the sort of grassroots commerce now emerging in the world wide web -- particularly as people recognize JavaScript is similar to the Self programming language and the Common Lisp Object System. This wasn't in keeping with IBM's philosophy at that time since they had yet to be humbled by Bill Gates.
My independent attempt at developing this sort of service was squashed by the U.S. government when it provided UUCP/Usenet service to a competitor in San Diego and would not offer me the same subsidy via MILnet -- a network that was not for public access, by law, and which was exclusively for military use. My complaints to DoD investigators resulted in continual "We're looking into it." replies.
Videotex Networking and The American Pioneer
by Jim Bowery (circa 1982)
With the precipitous drop in the price of information technology, computer-based communication has come within the technical and economic reach of the mass-market. The term generally used for this mass-market is "videotex" because it reduces the cost of entry into the home by using the most ubiquitous video display device, the television screen, to deliver its service.
The central importance of this new market is that it brings the capital cost of establishing a publication with nation-wide distribution to within the reach of the mass-market as well. This means that anyone who is a "consumer" of information on this new technology can also be a "producer" of information. The distinction between editorial staff and readership need no longer be a function of who has how much money, but rather, who has the greatest consumer appeal. The last time an event of this magnitude took place was the invention of the offset printer which brought the cost of publication to within the reach of small businesses. That democratization of cultural evolution was protected in our constitution under freedom of the press. Freedom of speech was intended for the masses. In this new technology, the distinction between press and speech is beginning to blur. Some individuals and institutions see this as removing the new media from either of the constitutional protections rather than giving it both. They see a great danger in allowing the uncensored ideas of individuals to spread across the entire nation within seconds at a cost of only a few cents. A direct quote from a person with authority in the management of this new technology: "We view videotex as 'we the institutions' providing 'you the people' with information." I wonder what our founding fathers would have thought of a statement like that.
Mass-media influences cultural evolution in profound ways. Rather that assuming a paternalistic posture, we should be objecti
Seastead this.
C64 & Viatel for the win (shudder).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esaMAyTbURo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex#Australia
What's On Your Network ??? http://www.open-audit.org/
i ran the tech side of THE SOURCE a competing service and alpha tested AOL for Mac and then PCs VideoTex (the French initiative) was very big then.
betamax
It's a centralized walled garden where you can't go off network, with no appeal to hackers because you had to have a license to create anything. It had no DNS, and was menu driven. If it had taken off, it would have failed too, due to limitations in the broadcast spectrum that they obviously didn't think about. That's why it didn't take off.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
No goat.se so what chance did the early internet have?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx
Because that wasn't the internet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The 80s were the days of CompuServ, Prodigy, and a few others. Everyone wanted to play 'War Games', or think so.
Pricey, slow at 56K Hayes modem standard and expansive.
Getting in a class at UMD College Park to study UNIX/C and the Internet was a great joy in 1991.
Later in the 90s, at OSU, I was a happy internet camper with Pipeline from PSI, then Mindspring, and not wanton to jump to A(W)OL which was a wreck in slow motion and way over valued by any rational human being, 'Ouch! what was that price again?'.
LoL :D
Ah those days of joy.
Was the protocol for Viewtron. Dial-up connections were slow. Server software was expensive. Resolution was feeble. Ma Bell had not been broken up in more competitive baby bells. In 1984, I was the coolest kid on campus with a 300 baud acoustic modem that was a major pain to make work with just ASCII.
And there were others too.
Why did they fail? It's easy.
Content is king. There just wasn't nearly enough content to access on these servers.
Beginning and end of story.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
What really let the internet take off was the fact that people could easily create their own content.
And, by "content", you mean porn.
Seriously, tho, I had an account on Delphi back in the mid 80s and it had all of this stuff and a much wider footprint. You could connect from any Tymnet node. In fact, I found the manual for it recently so I can look at the node list...11.5 pages of phone numbers with 41 numbers per page. And 3 pages of Datapac numbers for Canadians. Delphi had bulletin boards, chat/conferencing, financial services (banking, bill paying, brokerage services, etc.), games,marketplace, information, a library, email, calendar, travel services, and a few other things.
What really held it back, IMHO, is the cost. It cost $6/hr evenings/weekends and $16/hr during business hours. Plus any long distance charges. Who the heck wanted to pay $6/hr to play Colossal Cave?
Part of the sudden adoption was the free market at work, at least in the states. The 1996 telco reform act allowed companies other than the monopolies to handle local phone calls. That's why there were thousands of ISPS that opened up overnight, cheap phone lines. It also had a nice confluence of technology and society. Technology was also improving so that suddenly all those racks and racks of modems could be jammed into rack mount cards cheaply. Also you had all those college kids who liked it and got into the real world and still wanted the convenience of email and other services.. That's the power of the free market.
Of course Bush Jr put Powel's son in charge of the FCC, they rolled back the telco reform because monopolies liked being monopolies, and suddenly every non-monopoly ISP goes out of business. The US bandwidth speeds become a joke compared to the rest of the modern world. That's corporatism at work.
I think You'll find is a case of Need Vs Want. It sounds like Viewtron was for entertainment Purposes Only. I was in I.T back then doing all the home setup's etc. Most of the customers where getting this "Internet thing" because they could connect to work from it. You'd tell them that they could read news etc and they where amazed. Company paying for for the connections back then, and been able use it for personal use as well what a great bonus. Alot of companies started using it for work from home style setup's as well, It saved them money, and made people happy, it also ment your sales staff etc could check in when not in the office. Business was a big driver back then, not just for the reason above, but i'm quite sure that's one of the main reasons the "internet took off" compared to various other services in the day.
That's why the Internet didn't take off in 1983.
By the time the mid 1990s arrived, a.b.p.e.* was serving content that you might not be able to get locally and was really worthwhile.
Who else remembers Penthouse and Playboy websites when they first launched?
At about 6:20 in the first video he states that infrared is a "higher frequency." Okay I'm just being picky, but I think it is interesting to point out.
That seems way too simplistic.
In the early eighties, computers were niche at best. Something only for accountants, secretaries, scientists, hobbyists, and rich kids. Modems were horribly expensive, phone charges were criminally expensive (especially long distance), plus you had to pay for the service. Scientists and College students probably had access to one of the academic networks of the time, most hobbyists were probably satisfied with Bulletin Board Systems, and most businesses aren't going foot the bill for something like this, with the possible exception major banks and stock market trading firms. On top of this, these services were competing with free TV and radio and cheap newspapers.
Simply put, it most likely failed because the cost of entry was too high for a service that could be had for cheap or free.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
In '83? I don't think so, the A500 was released in '85.
Slow, expensive, crappy, no porn, etc. are all good reasons Viewtron failed. But the biggest failure was it didn't connect people to people. It could connect people to institutions but that is about as fun as paying bills. The best applications on the early internet were about connecting people to each other. I discovered the internet in the late 80s when I went to college and Usenet was a revelation. There were discussions on every topic imaginable. It was like having a living encyclopedia. You could ask experts about subatomic particle at sci.physics or join in a debate about whether hamstering is an urban ledgend in alt.sex.bondage. It was that critical mass and diversity of people connected together that provided the vitality for the internet to hit the big time.
-- QED
It may be true in your country, but certainly not in mine - plenty of people, myself included, got into that whole Internet thingy when we were still charged per minute of use - on dial-up.
The Internet didn't take off in '83 because computers weren't ready for it. Even after various networks started to work in university settings, it didn't become popular until the early web browsers and servers provided some content for people to... pirate.
The CS guys who used to hang around in the NeXT lab at the university were experimenting with digitizing music in '88, too, but you didn't see MP3 players until well after that point. They weren't compressing though, and one song took up a huge chunk of the optical disk.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is why Hutchison 3G is the fastest growing mobile carrier in the UK. Shameless plug, because I use it and think it's the best thing since punch cards, for £15/mo and no contract you get 300 voice minutes on any UK network, 3,000 SMS texts and the ONLY TRULY UNLIMITED INTERNET* of ANY UK carrier.
*I managed somehow to cause my local tower to blow a chip, rendering it inoperable. I called tech support, and in two days they had not only replaced the chip, they had replaced the tower with a bigger one. When I asked them if my downloading 6GB/day (low average) might have had anything to do with the tower failure, the reply stunned me:
"You paid for unlimited bandwidth, use it for what you want - torrents, web server, whatever. It's your bandwidth. Our job is to make sure you get what you paid for"
I mean, NO FAIR USE POLICY!? That's unheard of! Especially on a cellular plan!
This is why I'm not going back to unreliable, capped, ripoff-merchant Virgin Media.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Actually I think you needed the killer app that the browser was. Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1993. Gore's bill, the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, led to the development of Mosaic.
Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?
No porn and warez...
It had a high initial equipment investment, was slow (painfully slow), didn't look all that good compared to actual TV, had hourly charges, and very limited content.
In other words, it was from AT&T.
No, that wasn't internet. "The" Internet is a decentralized network of networks based on standards, not an agonizingly slow, expensive, lame computer bulletin board service run by a single corporation. I remember my Uncle kept singing the praises of AOL while I was exploring internet in college and high school. AOL was and is --to the extent that it still is anything-- crap. BTW, arpanet goes back a long way. It just wasn't connected to houses or companies back then. And before the WWW there was ftp, email, and gopher.
Personally, I'm waiting for everyone to realize this whole Internet thing is just a fad, like Hula Hoops and Rubik's Cubes; and get back to more productive activities.
Well, there were porn BBS's :)
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
The internet took off when the pc market took off
Back in the early 90s the cost of entry was about $2500 you could count the people you knew with one on you fingers, now with $300 walmart pc you would be hard pressed to think of 2 people you know without one.
The beginning of unlimited plans coincided with the plummeting of the average pc cost leading to a larger marketplace for an isp and lots more competition.
I remember the $30 for 30 hour plans and $1.99 per hour after that and it was that way for many years until the sub $1000 pc came along allowing affordable ownership for the average family.
You are correct the unlimited plans certainly sped the www internet on its way but how far along would it be if you still had to type on a $2800 machine ?
now ill give you $7 to mow my lawn
The simple reason other than cost was that there was nothing to see. Of all the services advertised, only one or two would appeal to the home user. I can do banking at home? Too bad my bank isn't supported. Check the weather? Sure I'll turn on the tv and computer, spend $10 and 30 mins downloading all the menus and eventually the local weather, or I can just pick up the paper that was delivered this morning. I can check my stocks and oh look, my stocks went up in value. Too bad my stock gains were negated by the costs it takes to check my stocks on this damn machine.
Now news and sports. You're starting to get into an area that people want to see, unfortunately the cost, speed and quality pales in comparison to other services like tv or the paper. Even then after you spent a few minuets getting the latest news, what the hell do you do with it? Play a few crappy games that cost you way to much just to stay online?
Think about how you use the internet. Do you spend all of you time looking at stocks or just on cooperate web sites like FOX or CNN your you bank website? Sure you might use them, (FOX? Really?) but you spend most of your time looking at contend created by regular users. Web comics, blogs, videos and forums. People that made stuff shared it on the internet and that is what got other people online. They saw it, asked for more and then made something them selves.
No Porn. Like the VCR before it, and like the film industry before the VCR, some of the earliest commercial successes of the internet are owed directly to pornography. Essentially all consumer products be they materiel or ethereal have 3 key properties: Utility, Necessity, Entertainment value.
Utility describes how useful something is, for example the multi-tool, aka leatherman, is an extraordinarily useful object. It essentially manages to bind into one small package the functionality of your average toolbox.
Necessity describes how much a product is required in day to day life. Examples of high necessity products include the cell phone and toilet paper. Both of these are tools without which are daily lives would be much more difficult.
Lastly is entertainment value, which describes how good something is at keeping one entertained.
I know by this point your are asking why I'm doing the for dummies version of understanding consumer products. I'm boiling it down to basics so you can see the core differences. Let's look at a similarly failed product: Laserdisc. Yes, I know Laserdisc gained considerable popularity in the Asian market, but it's failure in NA is at least partly ascribed to the adult film industry's lack of faith in it and failure to develop significant numbers of titles in the format. So Viewtron lacked the same entertainment value that the internet offered circa 1995. Viewtron possessed at least a vaguely similar utility to the internet circa 1995, however it's necessity was outstripped by existent technologies offering the same (and in some ways superior) capabilities. What technology would that be? The newspaper. I think we forget in today's continuous data stream world that the world of '83 was considerably slower paced than that of today. Yes CNN existed, but it had a fairly small audience until the late 80's. Most people in '83 got their news once or twice a day. The paper in the morning and broadcast network news in the evening.
So in a nutshell that is what killed Viewtron: It simply did not have the entertainment capability or necessity that the internet provided 12 years later.
Any offerings put forth by a carrier costing them $3,333 per customer in 1983 money would have gotten its ass kicked by all the good BBSes that were up and running at that time. The Apple II, TRS-80, C64 and Hayes 300 baud Smartmodem were widely available in 1983. AT&T's proprietary offering had no chance.
People were a lot smarter back then. Unfortunately the Sun started emitting extra doses of gamma radiation from the late 80s onwards, permanently ruining humanity. Thanks a lot Sun.
Try again. The A500 wasn't even announced until early 1987, along with the A2000. The A1000, however, was announced in 1985 at the Lincoln Center in NYC with Andy Warhol being one of the demonstrators at the show. I had to make do with a borrowed A1000 until i could finally afford my A2000 in 1988. Good times.
In France a simmilar system took off, because they gave out free terminals. In Germany some TV-sets could be ordered with buildt-in Bildschirmtext decoders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBfvIh2K4G0
The problem with all of those services was that they were walled gardens, so they only had very limited use. It was sold as a service, complete with content. It actually cost a significant amount of money to get your own page which. That, and the possibility to have people pay per page access or minute (WTF) caused the system to be used only for for 2 applications, Banking, and Pornography.
It had nothing to do with the bandwidth or the graphic capabilities. Back in the 1990s when the transition happened you were lucky to get 200 characters per second from some US site while Bildschirmtext (the German variant) already have you additional content from CD-Roms. From the users perspective the Internet was a big step down, but since it was so free and open and not just a "business model" all the good content was on it. The Internet was "free as speech" even though it was a bit more expensive and slower. Of course there were also BBSes which had a certain amount of popularity among private homes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBfvIh2K4G0
There were 2 classes of terminal for the German system. One for the dumb consumer, and one for the editor. The editor one was a lot more expensive. The difference was one button which had to be pressed in order to edit.
Again, if people back then would simply have offered shell accounts on Internet enabled computers, that would have taken off.
very few people had home computer. 300, 1200 baud rate modems. we were not ready for it yet. but in just a few more years things had changed big time. i started working with unix in 1984 both AT&T and BSD, then HP-UX by 1987 and Silicon Valley was going unix crazy. lots of folks had been using uunet -- lots of email -- lots of open source actually by late 1980's
The A500 wasn't released until 1987. The 1985 Amiga was the A1000.
Actually I was among many who were using it a few years prior to that and guess what?
We ALREADY had unlimited - FREE - access to the internet.
We called it "university"
For it to work, id expect it to at least have on-demand TV! But I guess with 5minute long commercials how could it not have failed ?!?
Anybody else annoyed by the background music ?
Whoever asked this question didn't watch the video...
And Minitel (a French system), is still around. Again, from Wikipedia
About the same kind of technology emerged in France, It was actually quite popular (France wide), until the Internet superseeded it : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
You could rent the terminal for a real cheap price (about 50 cents) then you had pay per minute scheme for services.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Because it was costing $3333.33 per user?
For something to succeed, technology has to be up to a certain standard. You can have the idea for something and build the basis of it often long before tech is ready to make it truly useable. The Internet started to take off when a few things had happened:
1) Enough tech for Internet services had been developed and was in a useful state. Thing like the web. The whole HTML/HTTP thing made the Internet a hell of a lot more useful for normal people. However it wasn't there in 1983, it didn't get developed until 1990 and then took some time before it was well hashed out with apps to support it.
2) Enough computer tech to make it useful. Mostly modems. As the parent noted, back in the early 80s you were talking 1200 baud which is pretty painful for anything but text, and even slow for that. Wasn't until things were 10x that fast or more that you really had the basics of what you needed for reasonable speeds on more enriched content.
3) Enough communications infrastructure and tech to make it affordable. The big connections ISPs needed between each other had to drop in price to where dialup could be offered to end users for a reasonable price. Most people weren't going to drop hundreds of dollars a month on access to something that was mostly a toy at the time and that meant there was only so much an ISP could afford to pay for bandwidth.
Only when all the technology was right could the Internet ever really take off. Hence it took until the early to mid 90s before everything was in place. Then indeed it did start exploding. However it really wasn't going to happen earlier because the requisite tech didn't exist. There's a difference between being able to do something, and able to do it well, and you have to do something well enough before the mass market will be interested.
As another example take compressed/downloadable music. The basic tech existed for that long before it got big. However the problem was that everything wasn't in place for it to work well. I remember playing with MP3 in 1995 (which of course wasn't the first compressed format) and loving it. However I had to drop to DOS to play the files, it took 100% of my CPU time and the little the higher level OS took was too much. Likewise transferring them was really not feasible. A 5 minute song ran you like 4.8MB which would take 46 minutes on my mighty 14.4 (28.8s were too expensive for me then) meaning an album could take days to send. None of this is to mention the time ripping and encoding took (over an hour a song easy).
It was something I messed with only because I'm an audio geek and I thought it was cool. However later computers got fast enough to play MP3s not just in Windows, but in the background, songs could transfer in a couple minutes, and so on. All of a sudden there was interest in this (around about 1999/2000).
The fundamental tech to make it possible in theory wasn't enough, and never is. Tech as a whole has to be to a level to make it practical, useful.
Seriously, I remember it. The costs back then would double your phone price. But the real issue is that did not have that many businesses or services on it. The reason why the net was so valuable in the early 90's is because it BBSs, and web pages just starting at the right time.
Finally, there were MANY companies pushing the internet. Large numbers of ISP's cropped up overnight advertising it. They also provided many local services. ATT did a few lame ads and then died on it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
PORN
That's what the Internet is about.
And like it or not, porn is a huge motivator (IMO more than social networks, music and online banking...).
Do this experiment:
Imagine the internet without porn.
Imagine the internet without music.
Which would you rather have? :-)
You know how fast are the network connections in between cities back in the early 1980's?
300 baud - that's the speed for an "ultra fast" modem
Yes, we do have "networks" back then, it's called "FidoNet", and it's the sysops (system operators) who are carrying out all those internode connections
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Hutchison 3G is doing the right thing with data but their voice service is dire. I opted for a new carrier after putting up with their miserable service for 2.5 years - I thought it my phone (Nokia E71) but when I got a new one, it was clear that it was the service that was problematical.
If you just want to use a 3G dongle from Hutchison, the charges are more in line with other providers e.g. £15 for 5Gb in a month. Using a phone contract and tethering is not an attractive option for all people.
From Wikipedia:
Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn noted that, "as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication."
exist yet, probably because it was a shoddy dirt track, that only one company in each area allowed access to.
Computers in 1983 were arcane machines to the average Joe, nothing he'd put in his home. They were not something you'd put up and go. Ever tried to get a network going on Windows 3.11? Now think DOS. In a nutshell, Joe needed one of those computer nerds who would understand those magic AT codes that made the modem beep the right way.
And WHEN you finally got in, or provided some company set it up for him, it wasn't graphics. It was keystrokes you'd have to memorize to get anywhere. No point and click, try and error. Reading a manual to learn how to navigate some page, pressing buttons and waiting for that godawfully slow 300 baud modem to actually come up with a reply.
This isn't necessarily something Joe wants. The reason the internet took off was simply that it was "mass compatible". It was able to present content in an easily accessible and appealing way. And let's not forget that in the "early days" of the internet boom, a lot of appeal came from the fact that you, too, could present content, that you could not only receive but also broadcast. The interactive element, allowing you not only to communicate and deal with companies and other "faceless" entities but also with "real" people and communicating with them, has always been and important part of the internet's appeal.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yep. On 3 too. £25 rolling monthly contract(i.e. I can walk away at the end of any month) nets me: -
2000 cross network minutes
5000 3 to 3 minutes
2000 SMS messages
Unlimited data + tethering
At home I'm pulling 5mbps down and around 2 mpbs up and that's not unusual around London.
Can't be beaten imo.
Without even looking at the article, I can tell you that the reason is bandwidth. This was the era of the 2400 baud modem. (It was also the era of 64K RAM, but that is less important.) BBSes and text-only online services like Compuserve were king. Just like most good technologies, it was ten years ahead of its time when first available.
Sure, AT&T had 56K data lines, but they weren't designed for mass market use (probably requiring technician installs and hand-picked wire pairs), and they also didn't want to cut into the lucrative premiums that they charged actual paying businesses.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Really, an "internet" where a user cannot post a picture of a cute kitten for everyone else to see has little value.
GUI interfaces have always opened the door to mainstream computer use.
* It wasn't until Windows 3.1 that your average person really took to computers because people just don't like to type and remember arcane commands. [Of course the Macintosh pre-dated this, but it was too pricey for mainstream]
* It wasn't until America Online and their GUI that people started using networked services. CompServe and its ilk had been around, but were mostly used by business and tech people.
* It wasn't until Netscape Navigator 1.0 that people really took to the internet. It provided a GUI for navigating networks and content. This abstraction was important for your average non-techie to understand. [okay, technically the masses came to the web through AOL, but once they got rid of the training wheels...]
So this thing didn't take off for the same reason early PCs didn't gain wide acceptance in homes -- they were too...'computery' for adults who had never used a computer before, and it was targeted directly at them. If they had taken the tack that the late-80s America Online did -- using a local GUI and only sending data over the wire -- maybe it would've taken off. But they hadn't seen a Macintosh yet (or been to Xerox PARC either, I guess).
I remember being at school in the late 80s and mentioning to a friend that one say the data on a CD will probably be stored in in RAM (not my idea, I'd read it in a technical mag). The guy laughed saying it would never happen. It won't come as any great surprise to anyone when I say that the clueless idiot went off to do an arts degree.
It was called CompuServe, and IIRC was $3 per month. But there were a lot of reasons being online didn't take off.
One was technology. 300 baud was the norm, far slower than 28.8, The most powerful PC at the time (I'll get disagreement over this; Amiga for one) was the IBM XT. 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and a humungous ten meg hard drive. Cost was prohibitive, an IBM cost thousands of dollars.
There was little content and no search capabilities.
It was a walled garden.
"Why in the world do you have a computer?" Only us nerds had computers back then.
It was text only, with no hypertext.
I found it to be pretty useless. Later in the decade I was on the BBSes on a used IBM with 28.8, and even then my online presence was mostly sharing software. An email could take days to be delivered, since the BBSes were seldom online 24/7 and few had many connections. I still got most of my software on floppies from shareware stores.
The internet didn't happen because nobody and nothing was ready for it. The internet happened when it was time for it to happen.
It was the 80's, everyone was too busy with hairspray, good music and doing coke to care about the internet.
I saw far more hair spray in the '60s, most music sucked than as badly as now (although thankfully disco had died and there was a lot of good rock and roll). Most music has always sucked. The "90% of everything is crap" has always been true. And coke was always too expensive for most people to do much of; coke was mostly a yuppie thing.
Free Martian Whores!
In Britain, from somewhere in the early-mid 80s on we had Prestel and Micronet. It was a moderate success, from the mid 80s onwards, Micronet was giving a free modem with each new subscription. The modem was "plug in and go" and included built in software - for example, the version for the Sinclair Spectrum had a ROM with the terminal emulation software, and the boot up time for the Spectrum + modem was under two seconds).
Micronet had a lot for home users - you could write your own pages (they called it a "gallery", but think of it as a bit like a rudimentary version of the web space ISPs used to give out), there were multi-user games (example Shades), "chatlines" (think similar to phpbb style forums), you could book airline travel etc., it had email, and you could buy computer games and other programs as online downloads for most of the popular computers at the time (ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, and I think the Commodore 64 too). It was only a moderate success because:
- To become a Prestel IP (Information Provider), you couldn't just hook up a server to the network like you can on the internet and run a bit of open source server software. Renting space was eyewateringly expensive. So no private individuals would do it, and no one smaller than a very large company could justify it. Because of this bulletin boards run by individuals became more popular.
- Per minute charges. During peak hours (9am to 6pm weekdays) they were very high, not only did you have to pay the peak phone charges, you had to pay 6p per minute to Prestel while connected. They later increased this to 7p a minute, and introduced a 1p a minute off peak charge, which hastened its demise. (They did partially back down, and Micronet customers could use the system for free during off peak hours).
- Many of the more interesting services attracted per-minute charges. Shades, for instance, attracted a 1p per minute time charge.
Micronet finally went belly up at around the time that the first commercial ISPs were starting up.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There were ISPs in the early 1970's, they were just called "Tymnet" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet and "Telenet" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet and the network was based on X.25 instead of being based on TCP/IP (i.e. it was circuit switched rather than packet switched).
There were plenty of server nodes as well, such as "CompuServe" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe - founded in 1969!, "Dialcom" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialcom - founded in 1970!
Other companies built on the same model, such as "Delphi" and "GEnie" and "AOL" didn't show up until the mid to early 1980's. Unlike the earlier systems which ran on PDP-11's, the newer ones ran on DEC-10 and DEC-20 systems, and later, VAX/VMS.
Heck, if you want to go back earlier, there was also "PLATO" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system - stated in 1960! But to use that you had to have a dedicated leased line, at least until Telenet connected up to it. The original PLATO ran on Illiac I's. In 1969, it switched over to CDC 1604's, and later CDC Cybers.
The first time I used Plato was on an ADM3a prior to 1980 when my dad took me to see it at the Utah State University (the guy who showed it to me went on to cofound Televideo to manufacture compatible terminals)..
-- Terry
The technology was not good enough in the early 1980s. Most people did not have computers, and communication was done by fax (business only) and telephone. The world was much slower in those days. But the biggest difference between such telephone based systems of the early 1980s (there were similar systems in Germany, France etc.) and the Internet in 1990s was the ownership. The Internet came out of universities and hi-tech corporations. And it was supplemented by a world wide modem-based communication systems such as Fido or UUCP-based networks. While modem speeds increased and cable/line cost decreased it became cheaper to have a computer hooked up to the net all the time. during my university time, I also worked for an internet company and in 1996 we had a ISDN-line (128kbit) from our home to the ISP that was awesome. As we worked there, traffic was free.
In short: The main difference between 1983 and 1993 was the difference in the approach 1983 big companies or state driven corporations tried to establish such systems. While the Internet was created more bottom up. A wide range of companies and organizations developed the network in the beginning. And we had cheap technology. Everyone could setup a server with Linux and co. as the software was available.
Dammit to hell. So how do I actually make line returns anyway?
I know you were referring to your previous post, but when someone asked how to print something on the third or subsequent times at the CS lab where I worked in college, we always told them:
cat filename | tee /dev/null | lpr -o prettyprint ...and then the most important part: you have to type "control M".
-- Terry
So I Googled and it tells me that "Hutchison 3G" are in fact Three. Three, in the UK, runs on the Orange network which people in my neck of the woods wouldn't touch with a barge pole because of poor service.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
No freedom. That is why it failed.
Online banking is JUST NOW getting decent. it took banks 30 years to get off their asses and change something. Back in the 80's they were still using hand crank calculators. You cant get banks to change anything.
Also the technology was there for the phone company to offer high speed data. T1 lines are NOT expensive, just very high profit. and your 1983 phone line to the house would support a T1 data speed just fine.
It's because in the 80's was a recession just like the one we are in now ( I was there kids! ) I dont see people rushing out to buy Fiber to the home today!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
it most certainly did exist and was going strong...
it was called compuserve.
Compuserve was already 10X that number and going strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
btw, I altered my username because at the time student's usernames were THEIR SSN :-(
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1982 22:04
From: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
To: BOB @ UCSC-Site
cc: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
Subject: Re: Monitor
In-Reply-To: Your message of 24 Jun 1982 09:19
Message-ID: 0322.06.24.1982.22.04.44 @ UCSC-Site
This terminal is quite nice for $399. It's an RCA. It has a modem built in, color graphics, and sound from 14 Hz to 230 KHz. (Why the heck do you need 230 KHz. I probably can't hear past 15KHz.) It even has a white noise generator. (Don't ask why).
The graphics are pretty HI-RES, 240x192, but it takes forever to draw at 300 baud. One could make impressive graphs but one won't ever see Pac-Man here! You can also hook up a cassette recorder to store a heck of a lot of data for off-line viewing.
I got a free hour on CompuServe with it. Ever been on that? They say it's simple, but it took me the whole hour just to look for one thing. The say it's menu driven. GEEEEEEZZ, they must have their menu's nested 50 levels deep!
I was looking for the multi-user Star-Trek game that I read about. Also the CB simulation (Randall probably wrote it).
The story of my quest:
After drifting thru 10 pages of menus, I found the newspapers that were on-line, so I choose New York Times. They wouldn't print the %&$#& thing out unless I subscribed! The subscription was free but they wanted name, add.... I said "SCREW IT". I could imagine how many menu's were on the other side of that subscription.
Now I had to "back up" thru the menus before I could move on. After another 10 mins. I found the home entertainment menu! I was getting closer. I didn't see Star-Trek but I did see "ELIZA - Artificial Intelligence". I decided to try it out, real quick.
This program CompuServe has (called DISPLA) is polite. Instead of saying #SCHED 1234 it says "Please wait. I am processing your request." Sure, I think that the computer down there realizes that it's getting paid by the hour. After 2-3 mins., it starts "Tell me what's on your mind." After 5 mins I was ready to leave, "QUIT, BYE, STOP, " nothing worked. She just kept saying, "Your being short with me.". I was getting desperate, I started punching all the control codes I could. I stoped the program but I hung the terminal. Oh, well. Call back. Back to the first menu page. But I was getting better, I typed "GO HOM" and I went straight to the home entertainment section. After about 200 more menus (estimate) I found "CB simulation"! Quick, read doc. Got it, run CB. "Please wait......". After 5 mins it comes back "Your free hour is up. Would you like to subsribe?".
All that and I never saw the program. For $5.00/hr plus $2 for Telenet, they can forget it.
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME ON THE B6900 !!!!!!!!!
No. Three falls back to the Orange network if their 3g service isn't available but they've been cutting down that service for years because the 3g service is ubiquitous.
It was email, Linux, and newsgroups that hooked me on the Internet in 1994. I don't think email alone would have done it. Screw "online news, banking services, restaurant reviews, shopping" -- those aren't killer apps to me. I need a forum for interacting with interesting people. The rest I can get to easily enough in town.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
Now a days internet is being used by everyone and it has become cheaper, initially it was costly, one has to pay one cent for each page, i wonder if one has to pay one cent now a days what will happen wether people will still go for internet as it is their neccesaty or internet users may come down. SEOWDC
It's just that it wasn't called "the Internet", and that in part was because it was composed of disparate but interconnecting pieces. By 1983, Usenet/UUCPnet had about 500 nodes; the next year it had doubled to around 1000. CSnet was a couple of years old and was growing. Same for BITNET. And of course the ARPAnet was still expanding.
There was no web, of course, but the web isn't the Internet. And a lot of people didn't use computers to access it -- they used terminals, connected to computers via serial lines or phone lines. But it was growing quickly, it was used heavily by folks in academia and research, and a lot of experiments/projects were underway.
Granted, the "club" was limited: you either had to work in the right places, or be a student there. But it was already large and growing. (And one of the ironies that often strikes me is that it was quite routine for Unix users to edit with vi, format documents with troff, read mail with Berkeley mail, and issue remote execution/file retrieval requests...all at the commad line. And I don't mean CS types: I mean everyone from undergraduates to the secretarial staff. A lot of them were very fast and efficient with those tools. Compare/contrast with today. This moment of rose-colored geezer reflection brought to by the letters V, A and X and the number 780.)
I'm sorry, but maybe I'm just tired and cranky. I pay $49 for 5GB of 4G with tethering at AT&T, and I wonder how people can "regularly" hit that. Am I the only one who tries to use wifi as much as possible?? In 4 years with an unlimited plan I never exceeded 1GB. Aren't the data hogs mostly college students? Do they not hit wifi because it's slow? Or because they think they're being spied on? Shouldn't they be drenched in wifi? How do you suppose a normal person reaches 5GB every month? Or even 2GB? Are they constantly on Facetime? Skype? Are locally stored MP3's now passè thanks to Pandora and such?
The Internet, specifically the World Wide Web, didn't appeal as much to the persons of that generation whom controlled most of the finances. That generation was not raised on technologies such as Atari or Nintendo. At the time technology was something for scientists, etc. The generation that exploded onto the web was the generation in which had grown up with those technologies and that familiarity with those technologies was just a simple extension of what had already been developed. Look at it in this perspective: had the Stark, Sega, etc. Stayed the way it was and not move past 8-bit graphics, I think the odds are greater that the www wouldn't have taken off for a while longer.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
Bill Gates must have been behind it, did you see the mail was charged? 10Cents a message.. Uncle Bill was behind it for sure.
What could have happened? Could it be, an antitrust suit, followed by AT&T breaking up into 7 regional companies ("Baby Bells")? I guess you can thank the government for stifling innovation.
Do you remember what Pr0n looked like in 1995? Now imagine that in 1983...
(And I'm not talking about the actors...)
Back in the early 90s the cost of entry was about $2500 you could count the people you knew with one on you fingers
You're a little high on that estimate. I got my first "IBM Compatible PC" back around that time (I had had a Commodore 64 for a few years earlier) and there were plenty of options under $1500, with many hovering around $1300. The one I ended up getting was from Montgomery Wards and was on sale for $999. It was a Packard Bell 486SX 20Mhz with 2MB Ram, 80MB hard drive, WIndows 3.1, and SuperVGA graphics. Didn't even have a modem, sound card, nor CD-ROM (though all of those things were later added, in addition to bumping the RAM up to 6MB and the processor up to a 486DX 75MHz via an Overdrive chip). Still, this was the first machine that that I connected up to the internet from home with.
They were a lot cheaper than what you're thinking. Still high by today's standards, but not quite as bad as your post would indicate.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I just have to salute all the Sysops out there, who somehow managed to keep the world-wide FidoNet (and several other smaller net) working, despite all odds
What happened on Dec-31-1983 illustrates the greatness of the many un-named Sysops all around the world:
Someone from Australia posted a "Happy New Year" greeting on one of the Fidonet newsgroups on Dec-31-1983
The message reached America some 5 hours later (to those un-initiated, FidoNet messages did not travel on light-speed, unlike Emails nowadays) and someone in America replied his "Happy New Year" greeting
That reply message took another 8 hours or so to got back to Australia, just in time for the original Australian message poster to receive on 23:57 that very same day
It was just a message, a simple message, but behind it, the round-trip message had travelled more than 60 hops
Meaning - for that single message, it took the effort of more than 60 Sysops to make it happened
For this, please allow me to salute all the Sysops for a job Well Done !!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
France had the widely popular Minitel system since the early 80's, and the UK had Teletext.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
I remember starting up PDP-8's where you had to use the processor switches to toggle in the boot loader. After the boot loader was in, you could load OS/8 from punched paper tape. The whole process was probably 5 to 10 minutes or so. Later versions of the PDP-8 (and 11) had dedicated boot roms and could load the OS from DEC-TAPE (or if you had lots of bucks even from the 5 MB hard drive).
I miss the good ol' days when you needed to know assembly language and binary.
A very similar system called BTX ran in Germany from the 1980s until it got obsoleted by the internet - or by generally available internet access, to be more precise. In France there was Minitel which IIRC got turned off three years ago and was very much the same thing, as far as I understood it. BTX which was based completely on dumb terminals (later mainly client software on PCs but the terminals were available quite long) and phone lines even had a rather wide user base, though it was pretty boring and not exactly cheap. No idea if it was financially successful as the telephone and data networks were run by Deutsche Bundepost (say: the state) then and they always had plenty of money to waste without ever giving a shit about "economics" or "efficiency"...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
In those days, a page didn't need a 100K graphic, a couple of javascript frameworks, 20 ads and a huge flash file. Total time to transmit the information was probably the same (but there was less information available on the early closed networks).
Trust me, even of you weren't alive in the 80s you have seen the reason it didn't take off. Just imagine the same types of plans you have on your mobile device except a lot slower, and a lot more expensive.
You must be 3's only happy user.
It was responsive? It costs a fair amount? Was UI friendly for average joe? It was fast? Working software, even almost bug free, is not the same as good software (one of QA principles).
ATDT 555-1212
CONNECT 300
HIT ESC TO CONTINUE .&*&^#@$&^@&#*&@# .(349398#$)(*&(*#&$#$..
.
.
Welcome To the Bla bla b..*&^.la BBS!
a=ansi/ascii.t = text.f=files.m=msg.b=beepsysop.u=upload.q=quit
hope you are hav%@#%^&*^T)DJKing a great day enjoy!
Boot times increased rather than decreased until this century.
You obviously never used an old mini or mainframe that took minutes or tens of minutes to boot. 5 to 10 was a big improvement! ;-)
But it was more like 5-10 seconds on my IBM. But if you had a Commodore or the like with the OS in ROM boot speeds were far faster than the IBM.
My old Tandy 1000 SL, which was basically an 8086 IBM-PC compatible design, had the DOS kernel and COMMAND.COM in ROM. It appeared as "C:" -- the machine had no hard disk. So despite only having a floppy disk, turn it on, and the OS was ready in a second or two. It was nice.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Services like this, and the French minitel (which was popular) weren't relying on client computers so much as dumb terminals. You dialed in to a remote machine and it just pushed text to your screen and took text from your keyboard.
Yah, and all the processing was done on the central host end.
Contrast this to the web paradigm, where all the data lives on servers, most of the processing happens on the servers, the servers just send a page description to your browser, and then send what you enter back to the server. That's totally different.
Oh, wait... ;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Yes.
I started in this field in 1983, so I've watched -- *participated in* -- the rise of the Internet to what it is today. This thing isn't remotely like the Internet. It's more like a very successful category of products that the Internet swept away a decade or so later: on-line services like Delphi (founded 1983), CompuServe (founded 1969, consumer services launched in 1978), and AOL (founded 1983, consumer services launched 1985). These companies offered what amounted to a digital shopping mall, building private, closed infrastructure in which business partners could sell services and products to subscribers.
Al Gore introduced the term "Information Superhighway" in 1978, and in the early years of the Internet we geeks often scoffed at the simplistic metaphor; but it turns out he was describing an important property of the Internet that Delphi, CompuServe and AOL didn't have. The Internet is not an information *service*; it's infrastructure. Like a superhighway, *anyone* can get on it and go anywhere they like. That was the point of the metaphor: it's about how consumers and companies used the Internet to connect with each other without a gatekeeper, not the technicalities of how internetworking is implemented. Today we'd call this property "network neutrality".
Now the fact that access speeds have increased from 300 baud, and that people have decent video instead of some kind of RF to NSTC TV box, and that they have highly capable web browsers ... all this *contributes* to the success of the Internet. But it's not the essential thing. 1983 was pre-Google; a time when libraries still had card catalogs. Getting information was a laborious process. The success of on-line dial-up services like AOL in the late 80s and early 90s shows there was plenty of demand for addressing this problem, even if it were crude by today's standards. But as soon as the value of information accessible by the Internet exceeded what any one company could cobble together, all those dial-up services were doomed.
It's worth considering that there's nothing to prevent someone from resurrecting the information shopping mall business model, using the computers and broadband access most people enjoy in their homes today. You could make a site the customer would log into with his browser, and which becomes the focus of all his Internet use. The reason nobody has done this is that consumers vastly prefer the network neutrality model to the shopping mall model.
The only way to resurrect the shopping mall model is to have a captive set of users you can *force* into using the mall. That means being a regional monopoly in broadband services, or being a mobile carrier with user locked into contracts. The dream of locking subscribers into network providers' services is still alive as a dream, if not as competitive business model. If you want to see the closest modern analog to the service depicted in TFA, look at the lame information services provided by mobile carriers such as Verizon or Sprint. Anyone seriously interested in doing the kinds of things provided by those services would much prefer to use his *choice* of services (e.g., Pandora, Gmail) over a smart phone than to take whatever the mobile carrier offers.
So to recap, the services depicted in the videos were commonplace shortly after its airing (although not with a crappy set-top box), but as soon as network-neutral technology (TCP/IP, HTTP) people abandoned them for the greater freedom of the web.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You could get a lot done with 300 baud. There was no Flash, no video, no animation. Watching the video I see there were pictures but only very few and they were pretty much 8-bit cartoons, not photos. What was being sent over the wire was just information as text. News, Weather, Shopping. This is nothing to us now since we have the internet and mostly on 'broadband' connections but it was a HUGE leap from having nothing. Consider this... when most of what you are receiving is text.. can you READ at a speed of greater than 300 baud?
Remember paying for long distance? That was the main thing that kept services like this, AOL, Prodigy, etc... out of our home in the 80s. It wasn't until the mid to late 90s when there were local internet providers in most small towns that the old pre-internet networks started offering the 800 numbers. As a geek growing up in a small town BBSs and online services were a like a myth. Sure I'd heard the stories but it wasn't anything that was ever going to be a part of my reality.
This is why Hutchison 3G is the fastest growing mobile carrier in the UK. Shameless plug, because I use it and think it's the best thing since punch cards, for £15/mo and no contract you get 300 voice minutes on any UK network, 3,000 SMS texts and the ONLY TRULY UNLIMITED INTERNET* of ANY UK carrier.
Another shameless plug from a satisfied customer on the other side of the pond.
Wind Mobile has/had a plan that I signed on with: Cdn $40/m for unlimited talk & text North America wide(!), unlimited global SMS, and unlimited internet (with a fair-use policy, which throttles after about 5 GB/m, which is fair), also allows tethering. No contracts, free Android phone (Huawei 8600(?)) on their "WindTab" where they knock off 10% of monthly bill from the retail price after each bill is paid - terminating service requires paying off balance of phone. Also, after 3 months service, they provide the unlock code for free (network unlock).
I can't help but think that your Hutchison provider will eventually stop giving unlimited internet connections: 6 GB per day is extraordinary!
All in all, seems some good providers out there, if one looks hard enough (and is not locked into a multi-year contract with another provider).
.. the game I wrote for the Apple IIe never made me a millionaire: The Librarian made me take back all the copies I had given to other students because they were playing it so much, the keyboards were breaking.
Part of the problem is the fallback to masts owned by other providers as Three has to lease the time. As such, whenever there is a sniff of a Three signal it goes to that mast even if the signal is piss-poor.
When I was on Three, the switch would occur and the signal would be lost completely with no hint of a signal for around 3 minutes. Not good when in the middle of a call. This occurred on two phones so it was not an isolated incident.
Sprint used to offer a bundled service that included digital phone, Internet at 6 Mbps up/down, and cell service for $150 a month...over a decade ago. Today people scoop up packages like that form Verizon and AT&T, but back then the service flopped (for more reasons than one). It was called Sprint ION and it was way ahead of it's time.
The only reason the Internet didn't take off is because the ILLUMINATI did not want it to. This Wide-Webbed World was not ready for the fast spread of information like you see today unfortunately. 'They' had to get some things in ORDER before allowing the world to freely communicate that swiftly.
It failed because AT$T was running it.
Why on Earth anyone would CHOOSE to do business with that awful company is beyond me.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System_divestiture
It's hard to tell from the wikipedia entry if the breakup had anything to do with this system not taking off.
As a cable TV tech in the early-to-mid eighties in Tucson, I can tell you that people at that time could barely handle a remote control and a set-top box. I know it's hard to imagine, but back then, most TV's did not come with remotes and unset VCR clocks flashed silently in thousands of living rooms.
I remember hearing about this marvelous technology at the time, and Cox cable in Tucson (I worked for Jones which is now Comcast), actually built a system in town with a "B" channel which was supposed to send signals back to the head end. I never saw it or heard of it working, last I heard it was abandoned for lack of funding.
Cable TV in the 80's was just like the dotcom era of the early 00's, with a lot of fly-by-night companies promising magical technology and failing to deliver, sometimes after ripping off counties and towns for development costs.
Why are you kids sitting on my lawn - don't you have a flashmob to go to or something?
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Anybody remember Prestel in the UK? Sounds basically like the same system. 1200/75 baud modem, not that slow from what I remember though. I also remember a friend (who was married) dating another guy in the chat boards! Was this one of the first digital dates? Sorry digital to analogue to digital dates, lol!
How much did university cost, and how much did grad school cost after you had earned your B.S. or B.A.?
...and David Lightman for declining the suggestion to play chess.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
Aren't the data hogs mostly college students? [...] Shouldn't they be drenched in wifi?
No, in fact. In the case of students living on campus, those taking a Greyhound bus between home and school over break may be riding one of the buses that haven't been upgraded with Wi-Fi. In the case of students living off campus, they may be commuting on a city bus, and those tend not to have Wi-Fi either.
Are locally stored MP3's now passè thanks to Pandora and such?
Not only that, but it's technically illegal in my country to rip DVDs to watch on a mobile device, so law-abiding citizens stream movies with Netflix instead.
It was rudimentary- just basic text and images. But it was free and hackable. Industrial strength server and browser versions appeared after that.
The free versions of software tend to win. ATT Unix was almost free in its early years compared to DEC and IBM. C== was free compared to ObjectiveC. XWindows was free. Linux was free. And so on.
I've been using the InterNet since 1974, the web since 1992.
the internet wasn't available to the general public. You can think Al Gore for making it available to the public.
AT&T, and Ma Bell, had a lot of these ideas well in advance of general consumer knowledge.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Connecting your PC to your TV through VGA or HDMI has its own set of problems, which is why the general non-geek public tends not to do it.
Gopher was my first introduction to the Internet and might illustrate another reason why the Internet didn't take off sooner. My first time on Gopher, I remember clicking around, going from site to site in awe of what was before me. Then I got to a link that said "The Middle East." Suddenly, I became afraid that I'd get in trouble for placing long distance calls at my college.
Yes, I was a complete newbie with no knowledge of how the Internet worked. (I researched it a bit and clicked that link on my second Gopher session.) Still, at that time, local vs long distance was a big deal. You could call people in a phone company defined "local area" for one rate. Anything beyond that started ramping up the price. So if you wanted to connect to the Internet, you needed some place with a local number. Furthermore, Joe User might have been afraid to connect with other people/sites that were too far away for fear of incurring Long Distance Fees.
Coupled with the other reasons people have given, I don't think it's a surprise why an Internet-like service didn't take off in the early 80's. It took until the 90's for the perfect storm to form and for the Internet to explode.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"Was the world just not ready for it?"
That's like asking why the first commercial flight didn't happen until 11 years after the Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk.
tell me, what's the correct ergonomic seating position for a keyboard and couch?
With the keyboard on the same sort of tray that you'd use for a TV dinner.
Amateur programmers couldn't run and test their own code on it.
Post-crash video game consoles took off despite that limitation.
Believe it or not AT&T was even worse back then. Not the only reason, but a contributing reason, along with the technology. It's why I have Verizon and not AT&T today.
Hence why he referred to them abstrusely by their correct, but uncommon, name of "Hutchison 3G" rather than "Three".
Slashdot shills. They exist.
You wanted Eternal September to arrive a full 10 years earlier?
The walled garden and centralized content and a stupid name all those other reasons people have pointed out are good reasons why Viewtron didn't take off. But I can think of another glaring reason that I don't think anyone's mentioned yet: The fscking keyboard BEEPS. Watch the video. With each keystroke, that chicklet-covered monstrosity BEEPS!
Program Intellivision!
Answer: No Porn.
Duh.
The Minitel device and services were available in France. 9 millions of terminal have been distributed since.
A 40x25 terminal, asynchronous 1200/2400 bauds.
If I recall correctly, back in 1983, Facebook didn't have Farmville yet, so no one was using the Internet.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
First of all, AT&T's Viewdata was a "walled garden" (if you want to call it that). You could choose from the selections they provided, and pay by the minute for the privilege. For most folks, it was a long distance connection, too. It wasn't too early, it was totally impractical. No fun at 300 baud - when you could get it to go that fast.
When BBS systems started to show up, there was a reason for people to use them. No "per minute / byte" charges, and other local users to chat / message with. I started a BBS when high-speed modems were 2400 baud. Over a few years it grew to 25 incoming lines, 14,400 and 28,800 access - and a huge library of files. I remember spending big bucks to buy 688 Mb ESDI drives to expand the system. At $20 per year for a subscription, it made money very well. There was FidoNet - and QWK mail, etc. to move messages around. I wrote some of that mail software myself. Whew; 4 "nodes" per 386/25 using DesqView and QEMM and LanTastic. It worked well for the day.
But the fun was over too soon - as ISP systems became common and people could get on the Internet (remember Trumpet Winsock?) - that was the end of BBS systems. What us sysops did to help - we got people to buy modems and learn how to use them. We were the training wheels for the new Internet generation.
1980s Apple ][ BBS was popular.
Maybe the ratio of computers with a modem was high to those without
The computer itself was an App that let me program apps.
I did not know friends with computers did not find that appealing.
They wanted their apps out of a box- like the creator of their computer.
The internet is a two way medium...what is described in the article seems like a one way transmission of content...communication and connection with fellow man is what made the internet take off...and thrive.
Hardware was expensive and slow. Most PCs (The MAC didn't exist yet) were running on floppys, modems were 1200 baud at best and they weren't built in, they were an extra cost and they tied up your phone line. In order to set up a computer that had a modem you were in for $1000-$2000 at least.
The necessary software didn't exist yet. There was no web browser. There weren't any decent GUI OS shells in common usage. The URL didn't even exist yet.
The infrastructure wasn't there! DNS Wasn't out yet, so you didn't have Domain Names. No DNS, and no WEB, so of course there were no search engines!
hey AC - do you get paid by Vodafone? FYI, I'm not employed by H3G in any way shape or form. I use them as a carrier and I pay my way, and I'm more than satisfied with them to the point where I promote them off my own bat and I do it for nothing.
ACs: IQs match their SID.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
graphic user interface. after windows 95 the perception of computers being easy propagated but prior to that it was percieve that you needed to be a genius to operate a computer by the general public. there was also the issue of price and performance.
was a pong clone
Is no one going to talk about using the Internet before they invented the @ sign for email addresses? (That is, the old UUNET days?) In 1980 in college, to send email to someone you had to know the path it would take to get there. Something like: "engineer1!myuniversity!anotheruniversity!berkeley!somecompany!anotheruniversity!address" as I remember, except much longer. Eventually, DNS and other nice things allowed you to instead send the email to: "address@anotheruniversity", and (Internet) email became much more useful.
I agree with some other posters that the key to the Internet was that it was developed by hackers, for hackers, and without egos and monetization getting in the way. You know, back when there were RFC's (Request for Comments) in an attempt to find the best solution?
I worked on the Viewtron project. When Viewtron was conceived and development started several years before the official launch in 1983, the PCs of the day were still confined to technical hobbyists and mostly had text-only displays. The Internet only existed for a select few in universities and government contractors. The World Wide Web had not yet been invented. Most computer communication was dialup at 300 bps or 1200 bps. Compuserve had a text-only service for geeks and AOL did not yet exist. There was no online service (news, shopping, banking, games, etc) for the general public. Viewtron, whatever its faults, was a huge leap forward for its time. I think it is another example an idea before its time like Leonardo da Vinci envisioning helicopters in the 1400's, or Alan Kay envisioning the Dynabook in 1968. Both great ideas, but the technology of the time was not up to realization of the ideas.
Nothing to add that wasn't said above. Oh, nastalgia!
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
Lol I took my 386 online in 1998 with a 2400bps modem. It was great with mIRC! I remember using opera (from a computer magazine cover cd) as it was much better at slow modem and CPU speeds. Though by then it had 8MB ram and 180MB of hdd space. I still have a ppt zip drive which worked surprisingly well.
It didn't take me long to buy a 33.6k modem and I bought a 486 second hand with a RS232 port that could actually run at those speeds. It was also about then when my ISP would refuse to accept a 2400bps connection... I also remember some Linux distros taking 30 seconds to start pppd and others being instant. Hmm...
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
I have a macbook pro
A lot of people have a desktop PC and don't want to pull cable through the wall from the room with the computer desk to the living room.
with only the usual stuff you have to deal with when using a dvd player
A lot of people appear to have difficulty with even a DVD player. See comments by hawguy, AdamWeeden, and zach_the_lizard.
video, and sound, through a single cord.
If you put the computer in front of you, other people can trip over the video cable. If you put the computer next to the TV, other people can trip over the USB mouse and keyboard cable. And a lot of people still don't want to put up a TV tray so that they can type in what they want to see.
Yoiu could say the same thing of Apples HyperCard, if only we had the idea to place it in a network.
The internet is the bare specification how computers can find eachother and exchange packages of information.
This limited scope was complicated enough.
It is amazing that the elegance in the solution for a couple of hundred computers still works for millions of devices.
Even the IPv4 to IPv6 transition shows the strenght of this elegance.
Once having this issue resolved, all the rest became possible.
Run your own protocol on top, if you wish.
No business plan, No patents, no royalties. That's why it did not flop.
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* Sigh *
I'm on the same plan, it's brilliant.
Compared to the other providers, not having to worry about hitting a data cap is such a relief. I don't phone much, so I'll probably never run out of minutes, 2000 sms's is about 10 times what I need, but the data that is simply amazing!
I have a Mac Mini installed in my car, and I can tether, without worry. If passengers want to download they can just go ahead, I can run google maps etc. I spend a lot of time in the car, and it really makes a difference.
www.Buy-Proxy.com - A "buyer-driven" global marketplace.
mr gates to descend from heaven
I'm late to the party, but since I was active on the various services back then, I'll also cast my mind back to answer. Essentially, the scene then was totally hobbiest or business. Each of these early services were walled gardens. First, as I recall it that AT&T experiment was down in Florida, and was mostly a newspaper subscription/shopping thing. However, it was another of the walled gardens and didn't offer as much as other services. In 1983, I was active on Compuserve, FidoNet and UseNet- then slightly later BIX. I'm trying to remember, but it seems to me that even back then Lexis/Nexis was the powerhouse in the news services. Businesses paid through the nose for Lexis/Nexis at the time. I know I used to go to GWU's Law library to use it, but even then CIS had more databases you could access than ViewTron. ViewTron was aimed more at consumers, who frankly weren't that interested, especially when you had to buy a specific terminal for it. The commercial services were all walled gardens in 1983. Everything was dial-up, and you paid per minute. 300 baud modems were common. I was the proud owner of one of the first Hayes 1200B modems. I wrote communications programs to help run the stupid thing. To this day, if I hit the right spot in my memory I can spout AT commands and tell you which dipswitches on various modems do what. I remember having to install a second line at my home, and god forbid you said you wanted it for a computer, because the phone company was convinced that if you wanted a computer line, then you must be running a business. You had to be REALLY serious about your communications back then. I see this thread has brought out a bunch of the Fido SysOps - Hi guys! Long time no see! TL;DR - ViewTron was slow, didn't compare well to other offerings, and was a walled garden.