Another analogy: I’d say YouTube is to web video what the Web was to the Internet itself. Before YouTube came out in 2005 there was some video on the Web, but generally you either had to have the technological know-how to upload it yourself onto your own Web site, or you had to donate it to a site like Ebaumsworld and hope they liked it enough to host it. YouTube made that easier by allowing people to upload to their own channels on their server. I remember watching Star Wars Gangsta Rap over and over again in the pre-YouTube days, so it was definitely around, but it wasn’t any video you want instantly all the time like after YouTube.
Pre-2004 or so most people still depended on dial-up of course, which would often time out before the video had time to load. So YouTube wasn’t really feasible any earlier than that, being a 3 or 4 minute video often took as long as a half hour to load. Likewise the Web wasn’t really feasible any earlier than 1988 or so because the protocols were still primitive and the number of Internet users were so small.
I agree with you, that was definitely a huge step. Even today radio and television is amazing and beyond most people’s comprehension. I’d also say that they have more of a homogenizing effect than the Internet and Web, which have actually increased cliqueishness and parochialism in some ways by allowing like-minded people to echo off each other. Same with partisan news channels like Fox. TV and radio allowed for a “Broadcast” culture while the Internet is two way. Though Google and Facebook are chipping away at the free, decentralized nature of the Net and making it more similar to old media in my opinion.
YouTube and Facebook have made me/we/us lazy, I think. Prior to 2008. The WWW in general took more thought and forethought, similar to this this webpage. But now WWW is much more passive. I kind of miss the internet of 2004, actually…
And “someone else would have invented something like it” or “something very similar would have come along” really does nothing to subtract from the achievement or its impact, and is kind of easy to say in hindsight. Putting use of the Internet really into the hands of the masses – beyond the Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy silos, and beyond the classic Internet universe of academic, industrial and military customers.
Yes, probably something very similar to what we see today would have happened… but may have taken 10 or 20 more years. Or would still be costing us dearly by the minute. Or would have had the regulators get their grubby mitts on it from day one, or would have been deployed on a proprietary basis and you could not link to half the world’s sites because of format wars. Or maybe not. But what happened did lead to where we are now and that’s pretty darn radical.
Sometimes you need a reason to push on and create something - the ideas may be out there, some of the technology but you need a catalyst. Money helps. The context for Stephenson’s Rocket was a competition prize, for the Internet it was its potential as a military asset - it attracted funding and gave purpose.
Both Stephenson’s Rocket and the Internet were the key moments in their respective revolutions. IMO.
I agree. The Internet is the ultimate “Cold War kid”. I think it’s also no coincidence it was given to the public shortly after the USSR fell. The deregulation of the Internet in and shortly prior to 1995 is probably at least as important as the Web as far as it becoming more widely used. The Internet went from being relatively unknown to the public in 1993 to being a household word by 1996.
I remember when AOL keywords were a big thing. I think the Internet as a whole is definitely a huge revolution, but the Web gets all the credit. A lot of bits of what we know as the Web like the Domain Name System are much older.
I got on PLATO in 1974. Plato had message boards (pad) chat rooms, instant messaging (term-text) and a newspaper, for which I wrote a Star Trek column, maybe the first kind of on-line Start Trek thing. It was not really a network, running off of two CDC Cyber computers, but there were PLATO terminals all over the country.
It also had a MUD and interactive gaming between players in many places. And a definite culture.
Ah nice a fellow PLATOite. I was on PLATO from 1980 to 1985 or so, programming and gaming… And yes, so many Internet things (including email, forums, chats, and MORPGs) started on PLATO. Even multi-person chats (talk-o-matic).
BTW - if you want to get a PLATO account and get nostalgic, there is a system running on an emulator at http://www.cyber1.org/ (used to run on a Mac, now on a Linux PC). They have oubliette, avatar and AFAIR a pretty lively empire game running.
Yeah, but just as important as Windows95 was, we have to mention something even more vital: Google.
Even though most houses had a computer by 1997,the web wasn’t very useful. It was mostly for fun and games. Every time you sat down at the computer, you never knew what you’d get.
Remember those early search engines with names like Lycos, and Hotbot?
They didn’t work well enough to make the web useful for finding good info. You could type in “hitler”, and the first results would include somebody’s personal “homepage”* with neo-nazi rantings, right alongside a respectable page like the New York Times…
So, yeah, it all happened in stages…first the WWW was invented, and nobody used it. Then Netscape Navigator was invented, and you could buy a cd for $50 to use the web. Then Windows 95 was invented, so web browsing was easier, but good info was hard to separate from the junk. Then Google was invented, and made the web useful.
So if the OP wants to know what the revolution was all about and when it started…Well, it’s hard to say. It just sort of evolved.
You could go all the way back to the invention of the transistor, and then the silicon chip.
You had me at empire. I played it when it started out as michelin - from the name of the lesson which the writers took over for space. On the midnight shift about half the CPU was devoted to Empire.
The first Plato V (I think) terminals with an embedded processor came out just as I was leaving Illinois in 1977. Someone programmed one to kick butt on empire. (Happily, on the side I played.) I also saw Empire advertised in a UNIX magazine in the early 1980s.
No doubt. And saying something like the Web was inevitable basically discounts every invention ever.
The world wide web was a massive sea change in how connectivity existed in the world. It was around as a niche thing before. WWW made it an accessible, commercial enterprise actual normal people could use. It’s like the difference between aviation of the 1910s and commercial airlines. Or automobiles before and after the internal combustion engine and mass production.
And Al Gore was instrumental in the creation of the Internet, obtaining government funding for projects on it as a congressman as far back as the 70s. Vint Cerf and others went out of their way to defend Gore’s contributions.
I played it when it started out as michelin - from the name of the lesson which the writers took over for space. On the midnight shift about half the CPU was devoted to Empire.