The Internet? Bah [1995]
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
...given their absence is one of my favorite things about internet shopping.
Several of the things he mentions in the article have changed quite significantly - buying books over the Internet (Amazon started selling books online the year the article was written) and sending money over the Internet (PayPal) are both common everyday actions now.
The paragraph about finding the date of the Battle of Trafalgar is particularly funny today - the correct answer can be quickly found and verified on Google, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and so on.
None of which existed in 1995. I don't know how old you are, but I suspect you weren't on the net back then.
I was doing web development in 1995 in the UK, and let me tell you, it was a whole different world. Searching was something you did on Lycos, or by drilling down through Yahoo's manually-curated subject indices, or on a Z39.50 WAIS server; AltaVista only launched in December 1995. Apache only forked off of NCSA HTTPD in 1996 -- back in '95 we were doing stuff on the old NCSA server, scripting in Perl and scratching our heads over the new-fangled OO extensions to Perl 5.001m. (CGI.pm was immature; PHP barely existed.)
Netscape Navigator 2.0 only showed up in beta in fall '95, with this funny thing called "LiveScript"; Java was the hot new language from Sun, and Netscape Navigator 2.0 (which featured exotic HTML extensions like frames and framesets) could run compiled Java applets at a pinch, if you had a machine with 16Mb of RAM to run it on.
The company I worked for had a 64Kb leased line; if we'd been paying full fat for it, we'd have been coughing up GBP 12,000 a year for the privilege. A 64kbps ISDN line cost 400 quid to install, 200 quid per 3 months to rent, and then fees of around 3 pounds/hour to use. Most people were using 9600 baud or 14.4kbaud modems to dial up from home. And "most" was the proud, the few -- I think Demon Internet were up to about 20-30,000 subscribers in 1995, and they were the pioneers. In early 1995 (or was it late 1994?) I attended a Demon meet'n'greet session in a pub in London, along with about 80 other folks -- the early home internet users. A couple of years ago a friend of mine pointed out to me that almost everybody in that pub had gone on to find work in the telecoms or dot com sectors. But at that point in time, we were just hobbyists, because the former meant "working for the phone company" and the latter didn't exist yet.
The sort of interactivity we take for granted today wasn't possible unless you were playing with remote X11 apps and had a dedicated workstation sharing a LAN with the server. (Something like a steamingly powerful 486DX/66 with 32Mb of RAM, talking over 10mbps thin ethernet ...)
Kids these days: we've come a long way, baby!
Side Fact: I was one of the first few thousand people in India to have - as it was marketed then - "TCP/IP Internet", meaning I could use graphical Web browsers. The unwashed masses (very few of them even then, btw) got by with "shell Internet" - shell accounts that they would telnet into and use lynx. (IIRC zaatar from around here fell into the latter category ;))