I've noticed 3 distinct periods of history for the public internet.

Pre-1990s when the web just wasn't there and BBS and IRC were the only ways of communicating. Getting online was a real pain sometimes, especially outside a major urban area. Maximum awe factor, as it was new to me, but limited in scope of what one could do.

1990 - 1996 The golden age when advertising was almost unknown, search results came up with mostly information and not "buy this, click on that" The web was flourishing, the average person could get online because it was possible with windows, macs, and amigas, not just unix. New things were coming along all the time. Still the awe factor, and lots of energy on the net as the culture begins to flourish.

97 and onwards The corporate age hits the internet, protocols like BBS, Gopher, Archie, FTP, and even IRC are almost all supplanted as the web becomes the focal point. Any idiot can get online. Everything is saturated with commercialism. On the other hand, its become a place where small businesses can become big for little investment, audio and video are available due to a 100 fold increase in speed. Individuals can now run servers right from their own living rooms for a fraction of the price they could 10 yrs before.

Question is, do you think the internet has lost alot of it's magic, or are you happy with the way it's going?

cv

Gone from the realm of geeks and weirdos to true mass market with more weirdos,and lower percentage of geeks.

Seriously how did we live without it.

I've noticed 3 distinct periods of history for the public internet.

Pre-1990s when the web just wasn't there and BBS and IRC were the only ways of communicating. Getting online was a real pain sometimes, especially outside a major urban area. Maximum awe factor, as it was new to me, but limited in scope of what one could do.

1990 - 1996 The golden age when advertising was almost unknown, search results came up with mostly information and not "buy this, click on that" The web was flourishing, the average person could get online because it was possible with windows, macs, and amigas, not just unix. New things were coming along all the time. Still the awe factor, and lots of energy on the net as the culture begins to flourish.

97 and onwards The corporate age hits the internet, protocols like BBS, Gopher, Archie, FTP, and even IRC are almost all supplanted as the web becomes the focal point. Any idiot can get online. Everything is saturated with commercialism. On the other hand, its become a place where small businesses can become big for little investment, audio and video are available due to a 100 fold increase in speed. Individuals can now run servers right from their own living rooms for a fraction of the price they could 10 yrs before.

Question is, do you think the internet has lost alot of it's magic, or are you happy with the way it's going?

cv

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sure there was a lot fun in the days when it was “unethical” to advertise and there were no graphics on the hypertext pages (was the interface called Lynx?).

Also when it took me 30 seconds to ftp from Microsoft US an update of Word 2 to my local university in Denmark. And then the rest of the day to download it to my home via a 500bps modem. We only lived 2 miles from the university – I could have walked there and back quicker.

But everything changes, nothing stays the same.

Dats da life.

Any idiot can get online.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sure there was a lot fun in the days when it was “unethical” to advertise and there were no graphics on the hypertext pages (was the interface called Lynx?).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Right you are, it was lynx running uder unix. All text and you had to tab from link to link. I believe the default home page Tim Berners-Lee's page at CERN in Switzerland.

You can see an archived version of one of his early news pages here:

WWW News January 1992

Lynx is stil alive and well; you can still download versions for various flavors of unix and other operating systems. I have a version running on my Mac.

I'd hate to go back to those good old days though -- everything was so slow and incredibly tedious.

For me to get online from Saipan back in the early 90's I used a 300 baud modem to connect to a local X.25 PAD and then via PacNet to a unix machine run by the old Portal BBS in Cupertino, California and eventually get a unix command line from which I could run lynx.

Back then much of the Internet was still 7 bit, so all binaries had to be hex encoded and files had to be less than 32K. To view a graphic larger than that you had to download the file in pieces, reassemble it by hand using a text editor and then decode it using some sort of binhex software. Then you could open the thing in a graphic viewer program.

Here's what today's www.thaivisa.com looks like in lynx:

======================================================

Thai Visa Thailand, work permit, residence permit, Thailand immig.. (p1 of 12)

[1x1pixel.gif]

[1x1pixel.gif]

[logo.gif]

[1x1pixel.gif]

News | Radio Bangkok | Thailand Hotels | Tourist visa | Work

permit | Non-Immigrant visa | Residency | Visa run | Reentry

permit | Overstay | Finance | FAQ | Incorporation | Newsletter | ExpatF

orum | Toolbar | Shop | Links | Contact | About | Search | Chat |

[menuBack.gif]

[clear.gif]

Bangkok Chat

Dream Businesses Here:

Sunbelt Asia

[clear.gif]

[clear.gif]

[clear.gif]

[clear.gif]

-- press space for next page --

Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to go back.

H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit /=search [delete]=history list

======================================================

Yeah, it was better back then.

nothing wrong with change - and the faster the change the harder it is for governments to attempt to police it. Advertising is easy to ignore/block so I have no problem with that.

I first came into contact with the internet in 1987 while I was a CS student at a military uni in oz , a couple of mates and I realised that all the staff had accounts set up for them on the mainframe with a blank password until fisrt login - - it was s simple matter to find some with access onto the arpanet and do a little exploring. we were quite impressed when we found a text game ( zork?) which we downloaded to play.

its greatest use in my opinion is for communication - the ability to disseminate information and collaborate without interferance from governments is excellent - apart from the standard geek usage of it - irc and pr0n

Question is, do you think the internet has lost alot of it's magic, or are you happy with the way it's going?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It has gained "magic" not lost it. I've been online in one form or another for almost 15 years. Think of everything that has happened in that time. Communication, commerce, content, and so on. It has been an improvement for established nations. It has helped underdeveloped nations to advance.

But there are potential downsides.

- Eventually someone is going to try and levy taxes on internet commerce. What then?

- Who is out there listening? What types of big brother-like scanning is going on behind the scenes?

- What applications are really running on our machines? OS's can be millions and millions of lines of code? What kinds of back door stuff is running that we don't know about?

Regardless, it isn't an emotional topic. Happy or not happy? Doesn't matter. It is what it is, to use or not use, get exposed or not, get spied on or not. Get virused and spammed to death or not.

The next real big change will happen when Internet2 comes more into the public realm. What happens then? Internet2 will eventually make today's internet look like what we had 15 years ago.

See below if interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2

I think it's getting better. I got my first connection to the web around 1995 and it was just a toys for geeks and academics. Yeah the feeling was nice, going through NASA website and look at all those cool pictures and then "travel" to another site with a simple click. I was more impressed by the technology than by the contents. Content was non-existant back then. Now it's too much and not enough at the same time. A lot of noise.

There is so much you can do today you couldn't back in those days. You can't regret that. We might in 10 years but not yet.

I remember in 1999 when I first when travelling and my friend said he'd set me up a hotmail account so I could keep in touch with people, I didn't have a clue what he was on about as I never had computers other than for games on the old Amiga 500.

Its still so new to me I can't comment on the 'old days' of the net, and though advertising and spam has gone over the top to a certain degree I wonder if they will ever be able to regulate it properly? It seems pretty lawless out there sometimes.

I never really used the internet that much in the past. It was too &lt;deleted&gt; slow and i would lose patience. And then along came BROADBAND, yabba dabba doooo. Now i'm never off it. The advertising, is the price that you pay for the popularity of the internet but without the popularity there wouldn't have been the input of money to fund broadband.

Very true.

Try to do a factual search on something in the USA, and the first hits are pages and pages of brokers or websites trying to market something

It in Thailand now too. I tried to find out the website of one of Radio Bangkok's advertisers, a Pattaya hotel, and the search on the name of the hotel just churns out tons of hotel booking sites.

It's difficult to say whether tis a good or bad thing. Either way we can be comforted knowing that it was completely inevitable. I think, in a way, we cannot compare the two 'internets' fairly. The web has changed so drastically that it is hardly the same entity any more.

It changed everything so does it matter if it's better or worse ? we can't live without it now. It's like utillity. Another reason why the "infra" should be under government control.

The only folks who think it was 'better' back 'then' are the dinosaur keyboard junkies stuck back in the bad old DOS days.

A related item:

"After all, when it comes to the Internet, money hardly translates into influence. Plenty of expensively produced Web sites are flops, while some of the most popular Web sites and blogs cost virtually nothing to run.

The real problem, it seems, is that the speech police don't like any speech that they don't get to . . . well, police.

The Hensarling-Reid approach is the best way to head off an assault on the Internet — for now.

The next step is to start reconsidering whether regulating political speech is a good idea under any circumstances."

Indeed…

Link

Most look like this

The only folks who think it was 'better' back 'then' are the dinosaur keyboard junkies stuck back in the bad old DOS days.

A related item:

"After all, when it comes to the Internet, money hardly translates into influence. Plenty of expensively produced Web sites are flops, while some of the most popular Web sites and blogs cost virtually nothing to run.

The real problem, it seems, is that the speech police don't like any speech that they don't get to . . . well, police.

The Hensarling-Reid approach is the best way to head off an assault on the Internet — for now.

The next step is to start reconsidering whether regulating political speech is a good idea under any circumstances."

Indeed…

Link

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I dredged this topic back up because of a piece I have just read - it is rather a long read but it is worth it - a little ameri-centric , but the points are valid worldwide I think.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8673

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes

By Doc Searls on Wed, 2005-11-16 02:00. Industry News

We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths.

This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.