The thing is, I can't remember not knowing about the Internet. They say it was created on January 1, 1983, when various smaller networks around the world agreed upon protocols to communicate with each other. My brother was writing code before he graduated from high school in 1981, as valedictorian. A little later in 1981 he went to MIT. So he would've told me about the Internet in 1983, and it would've failed to greatly rouse my interest.
Then comes a long, long dry spell, as far as I am concerned. I tended to say stupid anti-computer things. You know: the way people often disparage things they know little or nothing about.
From 1994 to 1997 I lived in NYC. It was then that I saw people, who hadn't been interested in computers before, suddenly become obsessed with the Internet. A young woman I know very slightly suddenly was wearing a cap with a big "SPAM" label on it, and I understood without talking to her about it that she was not involved with the canned meat: she was involved with the Internet version of junk-mail advertising.
She was much more well-off financially than I was even before this. And somehow, from my first glimpse of that "SPAM" hat to this day, I have always been pretty sure that her involvement with spam made her a lot richer.
Someone else I knew in NYC, who was about as poor as I was, which meant he was far too poor to own a computer of his own, got onto the Internet at a branch of the New York Public Library, and he became one of those people who were obsessed with the Internet, always speaking about it in an agitated, speedy manner. In 1995 a desktop computer cost anywhere between a little under a thousand dollars, to many thousands of dollars.
I had a very difficult time imagining the Internet experience, despite my friend's agitated attempts at description, and despite a lengthy 1996 cover story in the German news magazine the Spiegel which contained many thumbnails of screenshots of homepages. At the time I was not familiar with the IT terms "thumbnail," "screenshot" and "homepage." The Spiegel described the Internet like this: "Vor allem [...] Projektionsfläche für Ängste, Wünsche und Visionen." ("Above all a place to project fears, visions and wishes.") So some things haven't changed very much since 1996.
In 1997 I moved from Manhattan to Columbus, Ohio, and saw the Internet for the first time, in a branch of the Columbus Public Library. And I got it: visually, it was very much like newspapers and magazines. Indeed, many newspapers and magazines made some or all of their content available for free on the Internet. Except for pictures. Pictures took a long time to load, and typically a newspaper or magazine wouldn't even try to put as many picture online as were in the print edition. A smaller percentage put everything online than do today, and Internet-only content from a paper publication was rather rare.
But the mind-blowing part was the range of choice of content. Up until then I had to have a paper version, which, depending on where I was and where the thing was published, might take days or weeks or months to get to me. I could fight over the few copies at the library, or I could pay for my own subscription.
Now I just had to do a simple search, and boom, I had some, in most cases, and in many cases all of the words of a magazine or newspaper. I was limited primarily by the range of things I could think of to search for.
And I could read more than one language, which gave me a significant advantage over some people in being able to use the World Wide Web in a truly worldwide manner. (Skipping ahead to 2021: yeah, I know there's a difference between the Internet and the WWW. But I still couldn't explain that difference to anyone.)
I went from WebTV to WebTV Plus to an actual desktop computer of my own, in addition to the library Internet.
Laptop computers, in the 1990's, were much more expensive still than desktops. Compared to laptops today they were thick, and heavy, and their screens were small.
But by that time, everybody had gotten used to computers constantly getting better and cheaper. You could get a model which was six months old for half of what it cost six months before, or you could wait a while until a brand-new one was better and cheaper, but it would be much cheaper still in a few months, and so on and so forth. The better smaller faster cheaper process is still going on, but it was more dramatic in the 1990's because the sums of money per computer were much bigger. It had been going on for a long time before the 1990's, but to me, that's the kind of history I have to look up, not the kind I remember. Except for having read a mention of the faster better smaller cheaper principle sometime between 1978 and 1984 in some magazine, in a description of something I was not interested in having.
Around 2000 or 2001, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur I knew at the time whipped out a laptop which would look ordinary today, but which at the time was less than half as thick and about twice as wide as any I had ever seen. I expressed my astonishment and admiration at this device. This guy was always very polite to me, but his wide eyes seemed to say that he was thinking, "Wow, what a hick!" or "I bet this poor schlub doesn't earn in a year what this laptop costs."
And without a doubt he would've been right twice, but of course there's been two decades of better faster smaller (or thinner) cheaper since then...
He was on high-speed wireless Internet back then. Most of us were still on dial-up. Remember "Get off the Internet, I have to make a phone call!"?
Dial-up modems and land-line phones.
After seeing that laptop computer from the future back around 2000, somehow I got used to the pace of change. It astonishes me less.
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