I’d forgotten about this cringe worthy clip from 1994. Katie Couric are Bryant Gumbel trying to figure out what the Internet is. The original clip is in the first video.
They’ve teamed up again for a Superbowl commercial. This time in a scripted moment trying to understand BMW’s new all-electric car.
Thinking back, I’m not sure exactly when I knew how to pronounce an email address. I got my first one in 1986 or 87 after enrolling in my first computer science class. It was probably handed to us on a sheet of paper in class. We used it occasionally to correspond with the teacher. It wasn’t anything we used daily then. We shared addresses with classmates but just the first part (our name). Everyone had the same domain @ourschool.edu and there was no need to spell it out.
Bryant was probably in a similar situation. He used email internally at NBC. But didn’t know how to actually pronounce it correctly.
I would be very surprised if you had an email address in 1986 or 1987.
A lot of people had email on college campuses in 1986. Ours was hosted on a VAX-11/780 cluster. Vaxmail is part of VMS. AFAIK it was primarily email within our campus. I think initially it was to Faculty and anyone enrolled in Computer Science classes. I’m not sure when they made it available to everyone on campus.
I can’t recall my first off campus email. It may of been from somebody on Compuserve.
My favorite part of the old clip is how angry Bryant seems to get. Like all of this is just nonsense.
ETA: The at symbol @ predates the internet and has always meant “at”. The fact that he didn’t know it is on him.
I remember when the Web (as opposed to the Internet) was first starting to really commercialize. For a while, advertisers would give an entire web address (so, say, http://www.nfl.com as opposed to the current practice of giving at most nfl.com with the rest implied or taken care of by the browser) and then someone (say John Madden with the NFL example) having to read the entire thing out loud. It took forever too–aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double-u double-u double-u period en eff el period see oh em. It was hilarious.
That’s around when I got my first email address - it was through a dial-up BBS, and some BBS-related network as opposed to what you’d see nowadays, but a lot of my college age, somewhat tech-friendly friends had e-mail addresses at that point. I’m trying to think of anything that would allow me to pinpoint the time any more than that, but certainly had one by my senior year, which was '87-'88, and I think it was more likely the year prior to that.
Didn’t really get on the internet proper until '94 or early '95. Accessed Usenet via BBS’s quite a bit, as well as the precursors to the WWW (remember text based browsing?)
I remember walking around outside a shop, looking at my Coke Can. It said www.coke.com(or cocacola.com) and I was telling my friend, “Look, everything is getting a web site now. Weird.”
I had at least a couple email addresses at that time. Like others have mentioned, BBSs typically included email addresses, and I could get email through my Compuserve account. By 1992 or so I had one at work. They were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are now, but they existed.
For me, that moment was the first time a McDonald’s commercial listed their website. I was like “WHY IN THE WORLD DO THEY NEED ONE? You can’t download fries!!!111!! Burgers don’t need tech support!!!eleventyone!!!”
I’m sure many a computer nerd went nuts when they first started to realize that the Internet was starting to get mainstreamed and commercialized. One of those double edged swords, to be sure.
That’s a Super Bowl commercial? Because I’ve seen it repeatedly on YouTube. Like, “every single ad break in a 90-minute album” repeatedly.
Fortunately, GoogleTube seems to have moved on to a short spot where Mindy Kaling wipes her wet hands on some other woman’s dress.
So amazing how dramatically the internet has changed the world.
AOL Keyword too.
Wow, I had actually forgotten about AOL keywords.
Yep. In the 80s there were plenty of commercial online services that offered email: Prodigy, Compuserve, Quantum-Link, GEnie, etc. They were all proprietary addresses, as far as I remember, not the standard a@b.com format you see today, and I don’t remember being able to exchange between these service providers. I see that Compuserve was the first to interface with the Internet in 1989, by allowing emails between it and the institutions on the Internet. (The Internet itself did not commercialize until 1992.) But email existed in non-Internet forms for the general public at least as early as 1979 via CompuServe. (And of course it existed via the Internet for those in the education and government sectors.)
Someone left me a note just a few days ago with an address meticulously written out like that http etc :smack:
I do business with a magazine and their copywriters email reads out like an intricate password. I mentioned it to her and she said ‘Oh, it was something that was going on back then’ Right - but how about NOW?
One of the things that amazed me about his success back then was that he seemed to be mildly pissed off all of the time.
With the title and this…son, are you on the drugs?
I do like the commercial. It’s clever and making fun of itself.
Here’s an extreme example of this from the BBC:
