Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?

People continue to underestimate the Internet by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-01 17:35 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

Re:People continue to underestimate the Internet by steelfood · 2012-03-01 19:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

Oh boy... Terminology, folks, terminology.
The Internet didn't "take off" in 1983 for reasons that are completely unrelated to why this product failed. Most of it was because in 1983, computers were slow, modems were slow, and communication via the Internet wasn't nearly as practical as sneakernet. Imagine waiting a half second for each character of the (text) file you requested to appear on your screen. Those were the days of the 2400 baud modems, which were in fact that slow.
The only reason why people used the Internet was to communicate a very large amount of information over long distances to a multitude of individuals--distances beyond what a day trip could reach, and enough information to enough people that a quick series of telephone calls couldn't otherwise convey. There were the occasional hobbyists, tinkerers, and computer and engineering geeks--actually, the ones using the Internet were mostly them. The anomalies were the regular people.
This particular service didn't take off probably because competing services like Compuserv and Prodigy were cheaper and better. This service didn't take off more likely because their business model sucked, their management sucked, their product sucked, or some combination thereof. Services like Compuserv were ultimately supplanted by the World Wide Web because the WWW allowed anybody and everybody to generate their own content. But prior to the rise of the WWW, these services were the norm. Even now, there are some unexpected hundreds of thousands of actual subscribers to AOL (as opposed to the people who subscribed, and just kept paying their bills despite no longer using the service), because a lot of people only need and only desire such services. Not that the WWW isn't superior, but back then, the WWW didn't stand a chance. The only reason why the WWW took off was because the speed of computers, as well as the speed of modems, became acceptable. After modems broke 9600 baud speed barrier, access to the Internet was good enough for using the WWW.
And to make it clear, since this was my original point, the WWW is not the Internet. It is only a small part of it, though it is currently the most visible part of the Internet. But it is not the Internet.

--
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Re:People continue to underestimate the Internet by crankyspice · 2012-03-01 19:40 · Score: 5, Insightful

Imagine waiting a half second for each character of the (text) file you requested to appear on your screen. Those were the days of the 2400 baud modems, which were in fact that slow.
Actually...
(1) A 2400 baud modem would transmit approximately 274 7-bit (ASCII) characters per second (assuming 8N1) on a clean line. However...
(2) In 1983, 300 or (for the big spenders) 1200 baud was a lot more common. As late as 1988, 2400 bps connections commanded a premium (e.g., the GEnie service charged double the per-hour connection fee for dialing into their 2400 baud modem bank -- separate phone numbers -- versus their "up to 1200 baud" pool. 2400 was the fastest supported.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie
The Hayes Smartmodem 300 was introduced in 1981; before that, it was all acoustic couplers for normal folks, even 3l33t ones with high-end IMSAI systems who were intelligent, but under-achievers, alienated from their parents, with few friends (and of course, at the time, such people would have been classic cases for recruitment by the Soviets).
But even at 300 baud, you'd get ~30 characters per second, more if any sort of compression was being used.
IIRC, 1200 baud was about where text trickled in at about the same speed at which I could read it comfortably, and (for me) ushered in the era of the BBS, the original multiplayer shared universes (there was a text-based space trade / exploration / combat game on GEnie I was kind of addicted to, at age 12 -- I think it was Stellar Emperor aka MegaWars III: http://web.archive.org/web/20020607113100/http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/games/space/megawars_iii.html)...

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geek. lawyer.

No Porn! by zippo01 · 2012-03-01 17:36 · Score: 5, Funny

Enough said.

Why? It sucked. by RubberChainsaw · 2012-03-01 17:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

BBS's were better by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-01 17:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Duh by colonel · 2012-03-01 17:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Online services by Dan+East · 2012-03-01 18:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:Ready? by mjwx · 2012-03-01 18:55 · Score: 5, Funny

I didn't see it so I'm asking... was it a walled garden with adverts?

It was the 80's, everyone was too busy with hairspray, good music and doing coke to care about the internet.

Plus at 28.8K it was faster to go to the shop to get porn.

--
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.

Re:Ready? by ozmanjusri · 2012-03-01 18:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's an American imitation of the French Minitel network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

It probably failed where Minitel succeeded because it's owners needed to commercialize it too early in its development life.

--
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."

Re:Ready? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-01 19:28 · Score: 5, Informative

It probably failed where Minitel succeeded ...

Minitel succeeded?

In France ? Sure it succeeded considering that its been in use for 30 years, and only in june of this year will the service be taken permanently offline. And by in use I mean millions of people used it, not geeks but joe six pack.
Your average mom and pop, grandma and granpa. Universities used it, business used it, large, medium and small businesses. Mintel was BIG, so BIG that many doubted that Internet could even succeed in France in the ninties and early 2000s. The system was closed and not exceedingly expensive but it worked. It was secure, it worked and tens of millions used it. If this is not a measure of success then I don't know what is.

Re:Ready? by leuk_he · 2012-03-01 20:51 · Score: 5, Informative

Yes, and that would have been enough to start.

However the thinking of AT&T at that tie was "pay per minute", which would translate to pay per page. Imagine that you would go on the internet and pay one cent for every page you vistited, correct of not. The only way to boot it was to make it available for free, just like the BBS hobby systems that came shortly after this.

People need to remember that by Sycraft-fu · 2012-03-01 21:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:Ready? by flyingfsck · 2012-03-01 21:25 · Score: 5, Informative

No, in the 1980s, desktop computers took about 1 second to boot up: Click, beep! and you are going. However, modems were horribly slow. France and a few other countries had Minitel terminals that worked remarkably well. The fact that it flopped in the US of A, doesn't mean it flopped everywhere.

--
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!

Re:I was online in 1983 by weave · 2012-03-01 23:28 · Score: 5, Informative

It was called CompuServe, and IIRC was $3 per month.

It was $5 PER HOUR off peak. Peak business hours were like $30/hour. And it was slow. It sometimes took 10 minutes just to start the CB radio chat program.

My review of Compuserve -- from June 24, 1982 by weave · 2012-03-01 23:44 · Score: 5, Interesting

I wrote the below review of Compuserve in June, 1982. It was emailed on a Burrough's 6900 mainframe to the sys admin I knew there. Read it and understand why this stuff didn't take off at the time. (the first paragraph is about an RCA dumb terminal I bought at the time).

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 !!!!!!!!!

My salute to all the Sysops out there ! by Taco+Cowboy · 2012-03-02 01:13 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 !

Re:Intercity network connection back in 1983 by Amouth · 2012-03-02 01:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

$0.20 per KB.. still better than today's SMS rates..

AT&T charges $0.20 per SMS = 140 Bytes.. or ~$1.46 per KB

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'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'

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Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?

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