Slashdot Mirror
PCWeek on the Influence of the PC and the Internet
tmlrv writes " PCWeek has a series of articles on how the PC and the Internet have affected modern computing. Noting the source, its not really surprising the articles are PC centric (PC, as in IBM/compatible Personal Computer) and gives way too much credit to the PC for the spread of the Internet. But what I found interesting was that the part UNIX played and its importance is not even mentioned with the implication that the Internet was a totally PC driven phenomena. "
without the pc, e-commerce would not exist as we know it, nor would the 'net
I am, therefore you think.
Sosumi. just kidding. DONT!
Revisionism is alive and well, but this is always equal parts evil conspirators and the gullible public who are willing, nay, eager to believe. Netscape invented the World Wide Web and the Web browser itself -- everybody knows that! Seems it's all just a little bit of history repeating.
Fuck Slashdot
The PC is what started it all. In fact, I subscribe to PC Week, and in the December 20/27, 1999, issue, they have a timeline of computing since the 11th century, and one thing it shows is the huge part that the PC has took in the forming of the information age.
What is the purpose in posting this story? To tell us that PC Week is for "Joe User" and not "Joe Programmer"? We knew that. To innoculate Slashdotters against the idea that "Internet == WWW = PC"? We don't need that.
No, the only possible reason I can think of for posting this story (especially worded as it is) is to unleash the dreaded Slashdot Effect on an article that doesn't speak the party line.
You've made millions of dollars: now go out and hire a first-year journalism student to do some consulting for you.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
That's sure news to me... so tell me what exactally was Mosaic then?
But I still do agree with your point, in fact this kind of proves it.
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
It is easy to give credit to things like PC's or Unix as being a major factor in the creation of the Internet, but lets not forget people. I think it has allot to do with the way society is moving towards a more open mindset, and the Internet is a natural progression in the sharing of ideas. In the beginning of DARPANet scientists used it for a multitude of things but it all came down to people communicating. I think it would have happened not matter what platform it worked on.
A real human desire for freedom of information, and expression of ideas, thats what made the Internet.
Sigs are awesome huh?
and they attribute the reason this didn't happen to AT&T's not taking packet switching seriously enough. An interesting thought. T1 circuits have worked over regular copper for a long time now - on the other hand, I don't think routers and switches were up to the capacity demands that would have been needed to do anything close to an adequate job 20 years ago. But it's definitely an interesting thought.
Energy: time to change the picture.
funny, as I recall the developer of http did all of his work on a NeXT station. Not exactly a PC, not in the pratical terms - they cost around $10k back in 1989/90 and had 8MB or 16MB of RAM!
Hmm.. maybe I should have posted this in the linux/bsd debate
Damn I feel old...
I love Larry Roberts' quote:
"The Internet is largely the reason that communism died."
I can see his point to an extent, that the open flow of information makes it hard for dictators to keep a clamp on information, but it just isn't wholy true. The Internet didn't begin to come into prominence until the mid-90's, by which time most of the old Iron Curtain had fallen. It hasn't killed off Castro in Cuba, or Kim Il-Sung in North Korea. The Internet hasn't gotten Saddam Hussein out of Iraq, or Milosevic out of Bosnia either. It is still very easy for a government to restrict what information sources are available to their citizens. Iran, for instance, still heavily restricts what TV stations are available. And when it comes to the Internet, for most parts, if you control the phone system, you control the Internet access as well.
But back to the quote at hand. There are way too many other factors in the "death" of communism in Europe, I just can't see the Internet as one of them. Factors such as Reagan's policy of "offense through defense spending," among others, brought about the end of the Cold War, and communism in Europe. Not the Internet. Sorry, Mr. Roberts.
Seriously Slashdot gives way to much play to ZDNet articles and PCWeek. Why do we so rarely hear about articles from Information Week (sometimes from InfoWorld Electric), Newsbytes, First Monday, or IEEE Journals (hey, now the IEEE has NEWS FOR NERDS!).
Newsbytes is pretty pedestrian but the news is usually raw (uncooked, uninterpreted) and more appropriate for discussion.
I don't blame anyone for moderating this down, but it really bugs me when I see as generally intelligent a group as this repeating the stupidest things never done line. (like a while ago when a thread about a law suit spawned allusions to the nigh-legendary mcdonalds coffee lawsuit.)
So, just to get it out of my system - Al Gore never said that he invented the internet, or anything even vaugly similar. He said that when he was in congress, he supported a spending bill that increased the accessability of the internet from what it was then. You can argue about what that bill actually acomplished, or even try to find the context of the quote and see if he was trying to claim hipness points or responding to a question about his priorities where it was relevant, but for the love of the Taco Bell dog, could people please stop ragging on the man for something he never said!
Ugh. I mean, if you want, I'll sneak some lexis-nexus time and find you a list of stupid things he actually did say, if you just want to insult Al Gore.
OK, that's out of my system.
...will work for Chick tracts...
Ignorance is mandatory there, so examples are redundant.
From the writers perspective I would say that the OS in question was irrelevant because of the anonymizing influence of the internet. Can anyone tell what kind of computer, let alone OS, I'm posting this message with?
I definitely agree that most of the internet runs on UNIX. But the reason for the popularity of the internet, and the equipment used to run it are two different things. Just consider that the internet has been around for nearly three decades. The only people using it then were in the R&D establishments and academia. And this did not constitute much of a user-base and therefore, things like online shopping wouldnt really have clicked (pardon the pun).
With the advent of the PC and PC-based internet clients, however, the user base changed significantly. The user base of the internet today has become almost synonymous with the user-base of PC's. The huge PC revolution thus is directly responsible for the huge expansion in the popularity of the internet.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Here's what really was said, thanks to anxietycenter.com:
Gore has claimed during a 1999 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." The preliminary discussions for the creation of the Internet took place in 1967 and, in 1969, the Defense Department commissioned the creation of the "Arpanet." Gore was 2l years old at the time and it would be eight more years before he was elected to the US House of Representatives.
Gore's an idiot, no matter which way you look at it.
I am, therefore you think.
Look at all the companies. What do we see on TV when we see a commercial? It is always Windows x. Yes the bulk of the internet is made by Cisco and 3com and fiber and all that but the average computer user now could and would never understand and of the backbone. While we can all think, hey I have been around since pre-windows using my 2400 baud modem thinking I was cooking that is not the commercial internet. That is not going to get Joe Blow's attention.
Flashy lights and pretty pictures win the masses.
Windows has lots of that(as do most web pages). Basically Windows is the market place. Windows has the most users therefore a story about that has the biggest audience and the most understanding. Just my two cents as I sit here on my windows PC at work swearing at it because it locked up on me in the middle of this.
I am 31337 or something.
I think a big problem with the confusion over this story is the definition of a PC. A lot of people think of a PC as your computer you have at home and you mess around with. But as the article pointed out, they were referring to the PC as the IBM compatible (now Intel based) computers. Non mainframes, minicomputers, supercomputers, etc. Just little boxes at max 4 feet tall and a 8" wide or some such. That includes servers, workstations, and desktops/home computers that can run anything from Linux to *BSD* to BeOS to NT to Win9x and more.
The question is, really, is this a good or bad thing? Is the internet as it is today much better as it was in '90 or '95 or even a year ago? Is it a good thing to have a lot of bandwidth gobbled up by people sending instant messages(of any sort, AOL, MS, Yahoo, etc.), porn, spam, and going to sites that don't enrich anyone's life?
IMHO, a good internet user is one who uses the internet for some good, be it to further their knowledge, save the environment, upload a patch for an opensource project, etc.
But this article is something I wouldn't expect to find on Slashdot. This is news for nerds, not propaganda for newbies. Most of us are know what we need to know about this sort of thing. Don't try to start pointless debates on whether or not PC's are the reason the internet is where it is today. Let's get back to posting stuff that actually interests and applies to the reader base.
Most of your PC Magazine writers will probably also claim that Windows was the first usable GUI (The more clued in ones will grudingly admit the Mac had it first.) I was using X on some sun boxes in a lab at RPI long before Billy Borg thought to try to make his non-reentrant program loader multi-task.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Automatically. First time I got on was in 1992, using a friends Amiga 500 . Sure, the server at Millsaps was a Vax or something, and we downloaded C64 software from Europe with no problem. But, how many people had actually heard of this "internet" thingy?
PC's are easy to use, had have become the platform of choice to log on. Why? Simple, Unix wasn't around for Personal Computer Use in 1980, and CPM got outmarketed. Now we are hoping Linux will catch up. Given history, it should.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I saw in a talk back post on zdnet a while back a woman who didnt understand why UNIX was still getting media attention. She thought that UNIX was dead and NT was running the show. I think she was a lost cause.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
On several points (5, 6) you seem to be implying that PC means Windows ... last I checked PCs have run and continue to run on a lot of other OSes, which I'm hoping I don't actually need to name for you ...
I am, therefore you think.
There are alot of plans to put things like traffic signs and door knobs on the internet (the latter with a secure protocol, of course
The PC, much like magazines like PCWeek, are dead and don't know it yet. I'm waiting for them to die and go away. That little head mounted dohicky the dude in the IBM commercial was wearing while sitting on a bench in the middle of a shitload of pigeons was much cooler
--
How do you keep an idiot in suspense?
Tell him the next version of Windows will be faster, more reliable, and easier to use!
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
"Unix? Linux? Nyet, vee heard never of those...want see 2000-(19)95 year plan, yes?"
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
If you read every mention of "PC" in that article as "personal computer," rather than "Wintel," it's actually a pretty fair article. They never say once that "If PC's running Windows didn't exist, we wouldn't have an Internet." Nor do they imply it.
IMO, anyways.
They just tell us that having cheap, powerful hardware at home is a driving force behind the explosion of the Internet. They talk about the hardware far more than they do the software. If all our computers were still the size of entire buildings, I sure as hell wouldn't have been able to order my Sluggy shirt online one month ago.
Which seems like such an obvious point, it makes one wonder why they felt a need to write about it.
The internet GREW because of PCs and their users (When I say PC i mean any computer you can put on your desk that costs less than a late model car). If it was limited to unix users of any type (be it Linux if it was ever to be invented, or *BSD) it wouldn't have the consumer appeal it does now. It would be purely information (which is not a bad thing, perhaps in the future there will be more of an InfoNet instead of a CommercialNet). I do, however, think without unix of any type the internet would not exist, nor would anything like it (maybe fidonet and the other BBS networks, noting those are not realtime exchanges however). TCP/IP, and hell even Banyan Vines were developed for the unix popuplation to begin with - people with [vision|need] to port it to DOS or Windows* made consumer use possible. The InterNet is InterRelated. Unix and PC and Mac and Amiga and C64 and whatever else you can stick a networking adapter in of some sort to make it work. Now is this about the Creation of the Internet (ala Al Gore), or the Boom of the Internet (ala Borg Gates, with the huge PC marketshare), or the refinement of the internet (ala Netscape et al, making it look pretty)?
--onyx--
The internet GREW because of PCs and their users (When I say PC i mean any computer you can put on your desk that costs less than a late model car). If it was limited to unix users of any type (be it Linux if it was ever to be invented, or *BSD) it wouldn't have the consumer appeal it does now. It would be purely information (which is not a bad thing, perhaps in the future there will be more of an InfoNet instead of a CommercialNet).
I do, however, think without unix of any type the internet would not exist, nor would anything like it (maybe fidonet and the other BBS networks, noting those are not realtime exchanges however).
TCP/IP, and hell even Banyan Vines were developed for the unix popuplation to begin with - people with [vision|need] to port it to DOS or Windows* made consumer use possible.
The InterNet is InterRelated. Unix and PC and Mac and Amiga and C64 and whatever else you can stick a networking adapter in of some sort to make it work.
Now is this about the Creation of the Internet (ala Al Gore), or the Boom of the Internet (ala Borg Gates, with the huge PC marketshare), or the refinement of the internet (ala Netscape et al, making it look pretty)?
--onyx--
A homebrew workstation made from the following:
A motherboard made from a board...of pine
Jumper cables that actually are cables soldered on
RAM made from Coke cans and mercury
OS written in assembly language
Command shell BASH
Running X and M15
Sure, it's as big as a house, but it's great for tinkering. What, need to add a modem? It's off to the junkyard for alternators.
Real hackers make their own motherboards.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
is perhaps the worst form of this crap. Stallman as pulled off one worse than ZDNet.
Let's see:
"Linux has been gaining popularity, and has been out for 7 years. Hmmm...I must put my GNU cult in front of it"
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Imminent death of the net predicted.
I'll add a couple to the list of things that made the internet popular:
Good Guys
Circuit City
Best Buy
It was when these guys started selling cheap PCs in 94/95 that everyone jumped on the bandwagon. A lot of people were running Windows 3.1, not even 95 yet. Most of these guys went with AOL because of those damn disks. (I had Compuserve and the Well, and it really opened my eyes.)
>But both technologies have shaken IT managers and their businesses fundamentally. The PC revolution--much of which took place outside the control of the central IS organization--would shake the foundation of IT, break the glass houses of mainframe-based computing and move information from the hands of the few into every cubicle across the enterprise, bringing with it the joys of lower hardware and software costs, ease of use, and rapid application development.
Total self-indulgent PC-centric bullshit. I was in the IT department 20 years ago, and the only difference is now we run around fixing people's PC on their desktops instead of fixing applications on the mainframe through terminals.
A PC is twice as expensive as a terminal, and a site license for MS Word is tons more than an X-User EDT license. This is why Network Computers get so much attention. People don't pull stuff off the mainframe, they look for IT guys to do it for them.
John
What you're attributing to him is his explanation after everyone started to ridicule him. His original quote was, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." What you're saying was his equivalent of "Well, of course I never meant that I invented the internet, this is what I really meant," followed by the appropriate amount of weaselly BS. The funny thing was listening to his aides originally standing by his original quote until the laughter got too loud and they switched to the "that's not what he meant" tack.
Just curious, not a flame, but why were you so adamant about your explanation? If you were aware of his subsequent explanation (because you did get that part right), I'm surprised that you didn't know what he originally said.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Since slashdot went public, the "agenda" has become clear as day. Just look to the top of this page. Ka-ching!
A magazine is like a consultant, or a prostitute, they feel around looking for the thing that makes you feel best... ooh yeah lower lower, yeah YEAH! that's IT BABY! So it is hardly surprising that according to PC Magazine, the PC made the internet. Ask supporters of Al Gore, and they'll tell you he was behind it, since he promoted the potential of the "information superhighway" (yeah right). Ask the fans of Ted Nelson (I treasure his computer dreams/computer lib book) and we'll say he created the DNA right there. The designers of Plato need to be remembered as well, and what about all those BBS authors? Without unix and university networks, we'd all be still be loading software on CDROMs and grappling in our living room with some horrible video-on-demand home-shopping-network monster dreamt up and forced down our throats by the same people now making money off selling PCs, but without PCs and AOLamers and spam, we'd probably be poking away at message boards, reading netnews, and using a slightly less buggy version of netscape 2 to look at research papers. It all has to come together exactly the way it did to make the internet. I can imagine in a thousand years, people (if deprived of historical records for some reason), look at the 'net and declare it as an argument for God, rather as biologists like to look at an eyeball and say it is too fabulous to have evolved by chance - Maybe a future William Gates XIIII might grab that opportunity (I created the net!) to attempt to deify himself and further increase shareholder return. www.microsoft.com is taking baby steps in that direction already.
PC Mag is not going to be the place to look for a "Charles Darwin" of net evolution theory, that is just silly.
Seems to me if you like lignux and are trolling for trash on PC simpleton's flagship trade rag you will eventually find reason to be outraged. /. posts get worse all the time.
Asianflu, you're an idiot. I can't believe you wasted so much space ranting about such nonsense. This wasn't a PC Magazine article.
RMS calls it GNU/Internet, because while the Internet is the operational part, it could not exist without the help of his cult.
just to warn you, i went on a tyrade once like that after a misunderstanding... left my +1 bonus, combined with one "troll"ed post and two taunts, i lost a whole 9 karma points...
:)
Hence, why i'm anonymous as i speak...
Apparently what he was trying to say was "I took the initiative in getting the Internet II project funded." The question is, did he even understand what he meant to say?
USENETers thought the world was ending when alt.books and alt.philosophy invaded their geek enclave. They also thought the world was coming to an end when Compuserve got a USENET feed in 1992. When people started putting up crappy homepages, everyone thought the Internet was over. Likewise with everything focused towards e-commerce and money. Ahh, the good old days, may they never end in our minds.
was on an Atari ST - running a multitasking extension called 'mint' (multiple windows running ksh & gnu utils, kewl! (but sloooow!)) and a friend from the local U came over with something called 'unix windows' I /think/ it was (a mind is a horrible thing to lose) someting like slirp that I could use to ftp to atari.archive.umich.edu, yessssssss!!!
Sadly, I had to give in and a 486/50 soon replaced the aging ST.
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Sure the Palm isn't likely to have come out much earlier than it did, but I think something like the SunRay could have been a very early contender if there had been adequate bandwidth available to the desktop. But people thought 4800 baud was a pretty fast connection back then, so the mind-set just wasn't there. I think the technology (in the case of something like a SunRay) could have been developed pretty quickly even 20 years ago, if the networking bandwidth had been there.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Yeah, well, if they don't mention Clarkson (now Crynwr) packet drivers, they should have their heads shrunk and stuffed into an ARCNET packet.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
When I was a grad student at Caltech in the 80's, we used MOSIS (www.mosis.edu) as a silicon broker to fab IC chips. It was all done via the Internet, we sent CIF design files via email, and automatic responders sent update messages tracking the chips progress. Three months later, a Fedex box would show up with the test chips, and a goverment grant (and before the 80's ended, a VISA card of a company or individual) got billed. So, I'd say Internet shopping worked quite well pre-PC, as long as you were buying IC fab services :-).
Maybe this is off topic, but I think pr0n is one of the major factors for the initial spread of the internet (even though most people don't want to admit to it). It was true for the adoption of Beta/VHS machines in the 80s, CD-ROMs in the early 90s, and IMHO the WWW in the late 90s.
Well you're a double moron!
I would make the same argument about Windows. Microsoft did not invent the GUI and there are plenty of operating systems that could have replaced it.
BSD Unix is the true starting point of the Internet as it exists today. The Unix part is not important, what matters is the BSD networking software. That was the base that enabled TCP/IP to spread across the computing world, either by emulation or by porting the code to other systems. The BSD code was the basis for the networking stacks of a wide variety of operating systems.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And the WWW which is the same thing and email, too. He was in his garage at the time.
As a Pole who grew up in America and returned just for the '89 elections I can certianly testify to this. The internet and digital communication (mostly modems) had no effect on the fall of communisim if only because they DID NOT EXIST in those countries. Poland had a handful of internet access points before '89, the onlything digital comming out of here was Donosy, an underground 'newspaper' for Poles in America.
Underground nformation was passed on during those times by small printing presses, articles were carbon copied on typewriters, there was no information age to speak of, no modems to send files! Maybe one in fifty people had a phone line, not to mention that most of those phone lines couldn't hold a 150baud connection.
The information age hit Poland hard. Tens of thousands of companies had to be computerized, the state telephony put millions of dollars into the telecomm infrastructure (which is still underinvested). At this moment there is an information boom in Poland similar to that of the boom in the US at the begining of the nineties, but back in '89 there was nothing.
jay
Unix didn't make the internet, neither did the PC. To answer the question, you really have to define what the internet is. If you count that comparitively pitiful little network they had even 10 years ago as the internet, then yes, the PC probably had little to do with it and unix deserves more credit. If you think of the internet as what it has become -- a information revolution of sorts for society as a whole, then the PC deserves more of the credit, as it allowed the masses onto the network.
But I say neither deserves the credit. The bulk of the credit for making this thing happen was the decision to deregulate it and let anybody onto it. The political decision to let the average joe end-user onto the network is what really made it take off and become what it is.
Giving PC's or Unix credit for the internet is silly. Why don't we just give electricity credit for it, after all, without electricity there would be no internet. The point is, that the what the internet has become is far more than the sum of it's hardware. It would be like giving the television-tube credit for Jerry Seinfeld episodes.
The quote is correct. You'll have to do better than attack the source.
AlGore also said he invented the Earned Income Tax Credit. Trouble is, it was law before he was first elected to the House.
He also said he was a leader in opposing Big Tobacco. Reality is, there are plenty of TV clips showing "I planted it, chopped it, dried it, supported it."
Remember that heart breaking speech about his being at the bedside of his sister Kathy as she died of lung cancer? More lies. He was on the other side of TN stuffing his pockets with money, when she passed on.
Face it, AlGore has emotional problems for him to tell stories like this. Something is seriously wrong with this dork, and I don't want his fingers on the Buttons.
There wasn't any such animal. You had to buy that WinSock thingie from Australia, Peter Tatum, IIRC, and it was PPP, only.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 had a PPP option, but that's a completely different animal. WfW311 is Win95 with the old interface. Or Win95 is WfW311 with the update interface. Whatever blows up your dress.
The thing on the NT disks is a TCP/IP networking driver for WfW. There's also one for DOS, mostly client, but a server file for the brave, and it works great. It's one of the few networking options of MS that does work well.
Al Gore deserves all the credit. Al invented the internet, and probably electricity too for that matter. Both of which were curiously not mentioned in Bill Gates' book "The Road Ahead", which was written BEFORE Al Gore visited the Microsoft campus earlier this year... Coincidence? I think not.
There is a very appropriate joke about propaganda.
A book about elephants was published in India, as a single volume. When translated and published in other countries, various forewords and additions by local biologists were included, more or less departing from the subject. In Russia the book consisted of two volumes: "Marxism-Leninism about elephants" and "Russia, the home of the elephants".
While it's, of course, exaggerration (have to say that, or American patriots will take it for the face value), it explains pretty well, what should be expected from sources of informartion that mix huge amount of propaganda into everything.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
First, Al Gore made the PC.
Then he turned out his attention to the Internet. Eventually he worked out how to make it work, using his PC.
So, technically speaking, yes, it's fair to say that the PC made the Internet.
I'm one of the few people who has been on "the net" for 10+ years now, before the WWW existed. I remember the first spam post on Usenet. I remember when Robert McElwaine earned our wrath through his moronic posting of his moronic writings on multiple, unassociated newsgroups. We had no idea what was to come.
Many usenet groups are dead due to the spam volume, and people have moved on to websites to perform the same function (and I would argue that most do a better job of it, anyway). There's no doubt that the WWW brought a pretty face to the Internet and made it as popular as it is. Companies like AOL further exacerbated the problem. The WWW brought in a larger crop of people whom I can describe only as "perpetual newbies", people who will never get a clue about this stuff.
When I started with it, you had to be a Unix user to really, truly be on the net. Internet email was mostly Unix-based, newsreaders like rn and later trn were Unix-only, ftp clients, etc. All command-line, which helped separate the wheat from the chaff.
I hardly recognize this new Internet, centered around commerce and hype. The old Internet, centered around communities and people, was a much friendlier place, but we'll never get it back.
Do you have ESP?
The simple fact is that over 90% of those accessing the Internet are doing it on some flavor of Windows... that's why the Internet is seen as a PC driven phenomenon. As the Internet becomes more of a business model reality, this focus will only increase. Nobody but people who read Slashdot care about what's behind the Internet.
Overwhelming credit for the Internet should go to Al Gore, who (as everyone knows) is UNIX-based.
And X of course, I wonder if this is even possible. Nextstep got to be really light...
"ignorance is bliss" and if it wasnt for a little internet site called /. i would still be extremelly 'blissful'.
you have to face the facts: anyone who knows anything is too busy doing something to take time to tell the world about what computing really is. so the task is left to the ignorant.
we do all the work, they write their pretty little aritcles and bebate such things as whether win2k is better then win98.
PC exists long before the internet grew. How can the internet grew if the "public" didnt have the access to the internet? In 1992 public internet access started to become avaliable in the form of BBS gateways and dial-in shell accounts, some of them became "the" ISP.
....and that's just the old school, non-Unix stuff.
...you know, sarcasm? Irony? Satire?
pcs don't make the internet, they just use it. the internet was, is, and will allways be run by linux. why are we listening or reading pc week anyway? don't bother reading pc week anymore, read mac world, or linux today, much better reading. I find all that pc week is good for is wiping your ass when you run out of toilet paper and you don't have a standby roll.
either we are networking or we areNT networking
You seem to all be forgetting that the internet is not held together by Unix/Win/ANYTHING based computers.. sure they hold up the services behind the connections, but some of the biggest keys to internet connectivity are the routers/switches/high end network connectivity machines that route your traffic to and from wherever you go every day.
The people I thank for the internet are not the PC or Unix manufacturers, but groups like the IETF and the IEEE that defined all these protocols that you're using right now.
In my opinion the people responsible for the internet break down into these catagories (sorted by level of importance.)
1. groups like the IETF and the IEEE who defined internetworking and protocol standards.. without them we wouldn't have anything to implement.
2. The companies that took the protocol standards and implemented them into network connectivity hardware (the ciscos, the nortels (I have no idea who made the stuff back in the 70's, but you get my drift.)
3. The UNIX!! - Unix was and still is the internet standard for hosting services (anyone who remembers back when an internet account meant a dialup shell on a Unix box knows this.) Berkeley Software Development, AT&T Labs, Sun Microsystems.. THANK YOU!!!
4. The users.. finally at #4 the PCs come into play.. we used the internet, liked it, spread the word, corporations caught on (after the internet was finally opened to commercial traffic in 1992.) and the internet evolved into what we have today.
flame me all you want..
- Darth Sidious | Chairman / CEO |Dark Jedi Network Services | http://www.dark-jedi.net
Giving PC's or Unix credit for the internet is silly. Why don't we just give electricity credit for it, after all, without electricity there would be no internet. The point is, that the what the internet has become is far more than the sum of it's hardware. It would be like giving the television-tube credit for Jerry Seinfeld episodes.
;-)
Why don't we just cut out the middle man? The Sun gives the majority of this planet's energy to it. Without the sun, there would be no life, no humans, no electric lines, no internet.
Therefore, it's all the sun's fault.
Of course, the sun only exists because of the big bang a few billion years ago....
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.