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. "
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.
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...
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.
Well, IMNSHO, I think it's the windows luser^H^H^H^H^Husers who made it possible for internet exploiters like spammers, bloated webpages, screwed up HTML email, and gratituously incompatible IE-specific Web pages to exist. In general, the deteriorating signal-to-noise ratio of the Net is, for the large part, due to the large Windows-user audience. Yes spammers existed before Windozers started to get on the scene, but it's only when you have such a large base of ignorant^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hunaware users who can easily fall prey to them that they have become so widespread. And it's when you have hoards and hoards of people who think it's "cool" to send HTML emails loaded with the latest, cutest, GIF animation that the Net started to harbor all the useless junk and suck up precious bandwidth.
OT1H they are the reason the Internet became so popular and so influential today. OTOH, they have caused a lot of grief like the plummeting S/N ratio, screwed-up HTML emails, bloated useless-graphics-laden webpages, ... and they are the naive people who say "yes yes this feature will be SOOO neat" to MS when it comes out with the latest crapware oozing with features and security holes, and actually buys these crapware, not knowing the dangers nor the grief they cause the network.
Well, I don't even know why I'm ranting against Windows users, I've nothing against them personally. But it's just this paradoxical situation of the Net today -- it's very powerful and very influential because of the large numbers of these users. Which is good in a sense: it's because of this that people like us Slashdotters can make an impact just by posting/reading Slashdot. But OTOH there are also loads of crap on the Net nowadays (I'll refrain from repeating it all over again), also because large numbers of users are the audience.
Seems that every time something becomes this popular, immediately you have the "newbie effect" -- deterioration of quality, increase of noise, etc., alongside the better developments. Sad.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
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.
windows users are what made the internet what it is today.
Thats right.
And making the internet more and more user-friendly is a good thing, even if most of the users are AOL-ites. Because we don't want the internet to just stay the domain of techie people. We want it to be easily accessible so that it can do its most important job: to spread information.
Knowledge is power, whether its researching for an essay, or starting a revolution.
I'm going to go a little bit out on a limb here and attempt to argue a plausible defense for the posting of this article. Off the record, I would agree with some of what you say, especially that it seems to be written in the fashion of a taunt. However, slashdot, at least as I see it, is a site which is dedicated, for the most part, to presenting information about science and technology from a perspective that is not necessarily in line with the stuff that pops up on cnet, cnn, etc. Therefore, if /. hired a journalism student as you suggest, I think that the effect would be to make /. a more "normal" or regular type of news site. There is no question that a story about the internet, its creation, its usage, and its future falls under the news areas usually covered by slashot. Additionally, the story also relates to how the general Windows PC using public views the internet. I don't doubt that other stories have been posted on slashdot that had similar story lines, but I feel that understanding how the general public views the internet and PCs is a crucial part of understanding how to teach them about the parts of the internet and the IT industry that they don't see. The article is written to cater to the general public, but for those of us who exclude ourselves from that group of users, whether it is because we use Linux, BSD, even Mac or Windows, or whatever (I say that we exclude ourselves because we demonstrate a desire to learn and to understand), the article tells us much about how the internet is perceived. Granted, the article is not particularly intelligent, but it is a useful device for didactic purposes, if nothing else. Well, perhaps I have not expressed myself in the clearest fashion possible, but I think that I successfully conveyed the basic message I wished.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
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)
"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--
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.
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
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.
(IIRC, at that stage, if Linux had even been released, it didn't have a TCP/IP stack of any kind yet.)
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)
From http://www.yip.org/hacking.html:
Internet®: (1) A network of computers established by the US military at the beginning of the Cold War, with the hope that in the event of nuclear war, members of the military could continue to view porn, play Quake and trade tips on how to make money quickly. (2) That icon on Windows 95 that takes you to the Dilbert page.
Microsoft: The company that invented the Internet in 1995.
Netscape: The company that invented the Internet in 1992.
I hope that clears everything up for everyone.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Which is somewhat amusing, as (perhaps aided and abetted by the Obligatory X10 Babe Ad on the PC Week pages) I misread "first ARPAnet node" in one of the paragraphs as "first ARPAnet nude".
So what was the first ARPAnet nude? And how soon after the first ARPAnet node appeared did the first ARPAnet nude appear?
(And, yes, I suspect you're right. Rather a lot of bits stored on, and cached by, Network Appliance boxes are probably Naughty Bits, so I probably owe some of my net worth to the human sex drive....)
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Hmmm... seems to me that you have the cart before the horse. The Internet is the "killer app" that has spawned the PC revolution. I would wager that the majority of the people wh bought PCs the past couple of years did so to get on the "Net".
If you want to look at what has made the internet then you need to look at the standards which made it easily accessable, like TCP/IP, HTTP, etc. The OS that is connecting up to it really doesn't matter. But... the OS that was running those servers (until recently those were almost all Unix) that we dial into does matter. Bill Gates would not be the wealthy man he is today without the technology that drove the net.
IMHO the home computer revolution would not have happened without the Internet(and the online services before that) to drive it. Giving credit to Windows, Windows users, etc... is just silly to me. MS came in after the fact and simply used what had already been put in place.