I just came back from a vacation. For two weeks I was in Nova Scotia, where the weather was terrible (unless you like lots of rain and fog). The place where I was staying had a large collection of Rolling Stone magazines circa 1984 - 1992. I ended up reading them all. It was quite an interesting time capsule. CD’s were coming to the forefront, The Pixies were a new band, Sam Kinnison was cleaning up his life and there were no mentions of the internet or anything internet related. Which leads me to my question(s).
When was the first mention of the internet in a nontechnological publication (was it in Time Magazine in the 70’s?)?
When did Rolling Stone (or any other pop culture medium) first mention the internet?
When did you first hear about the internet?
I think my first exposure to the internet was in around 1994 when a computerguy friend of mine tee’d up a 14.4 dialup connection.
When did I first hear about the internet? I was online for the first time in around 1978. First time on the web was 1990 IIRC
I probably became aware of it as such around 1990 or '91, but that would have been through computer magazines. Just going by memory, it seems like Compuserve might’ve appeared by the late '80s.
A Little History of the World Wide Web
FYI - The Internet and the WWW are not synonymous.
Note that the term “Internet” is recent, so to speak. If you want to do a publication search, try “Arpanet” instead.
And Compuserve had absolutely zilch to do with the Internet. Ditto AOL.
Everybody in Computer Science wanted Arpanet access by the late '70s. But funding was quite restricted so relatively few had access until NSFNet. (In the US.)
Many colleges started to allow all faculty/staff/students (what was to become) Internet access in the late '80s. So by that time it was becoming quite popular.
(I started using Arpanet email indirectly in '77. But I wasn’t listed in the printed Arpanet book of everybody’s email address until '80. Try making a book like that now!)
There wasn’t any World Wide Web in 1990, it was just being created then. In fact, there was almost no web traffic at all until 1993 or 1994. 1994 to 1996 is when it really started to take off.
It’s amazing, really, how recent the web is, considering how common it has become in many of our lives. It seems like it’s been around a lot longer than it has. The Internet (nee Arpanet) has been around a lot longer of course, but most non-technical people never heard of the internet until the web became popular around 1995.
I had a CompuServe account in about 1983, and used my Commodore 64 and a simple terminal emulation program to access it. During that time I also dialed into some private BBSs here and there, but the long distance charges and a 300 baud modem made things kind of pricey. Not being a government employee, college student or faculty, there was no practical way for me to get access to the net as it existed then. I dropped that CompuServe account a couple of years later, and didn’t get another one until about 1988, when I got one for work.
By about 1994 we wanted full access to the internet (specifically for Usenet and Gopher, the web was pretty much a no-interest frill for us at that time) and all CompuServe was giving us at that time was email. Because so many major hardware and software manufacturers had forums on CompuServe where we could get support and help, we kept CompuServe, but also signed up with a local ISP for straight internet access
The web started getting a lot of attention from the media somewhere in the next year or so, approximately 1995. I don’t recall much talk (among the non-technical) before then.
At the time we first got access to the web (1994 –1995) it was getting interesting, but there still wasn’t all that much there. There was much more useful information to be had on CompuServe, Usenet, and BBSs.
That situation changed dramatically over the next 5 years. BBSs went by the wayside quickly, and I think I cancelled my CompuServe account in about 2000, when I realized I hadn’t used it more than about twice in the previous year. But I still use Usenet newsgroups fairly frequently, both for fun and business.
If you learn nothing else from this, know this: The World Wide Web is one of many things you can do with the Internet. It isn’t the most important, it damned well ain’t the oldest, and it isn’t even the most complex. It’s simply the `killer app,’ the single Big Deal that made everyone sit up and take notice of the Internet, which until then had been the sole domain (pun intended) of large Universities and Larger Militaries.
The Web was to the Internet as Lotus 1-2-3 was to the PC.
The Los Angles Times on-line archives go back to 1986. There is one reference to the Internet in the San Diego County edition of 24 September 1986 (context unknown). The next reference to the Internet is from November-December 1988, when a hacker unleashed a virus that infiltrated the computers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA’s Ames Research Center, and several universities.
Followup stories related to that virus attack continued into 1989, including a story headlined “Plan Sought to Keep `Viruses’ From a Computer Network” in the Los Angeles Times’ Orange County edition on 21 July 1989, and summarized:
I believe the first commercial dial-up Internet service became available in 1985; you probably will not find any references to the Internet (or its predecessor the Arpanet) in non-technological periodicals before then.
The World Wide Web portion of the Internet was invented in 1989. But its protocols were not published until 1990, and the first Web browser became available in 1991. So you probably won’t find any reference to the Web in non-technological periodicals before 1991.