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Comment by askmike | Hacker News Reader

> Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would.

I'm too young to have experienced this. But I've seen countless of clips and interviews of people claiming they would never use the internet because they can send post and use a telephone instead. "Computers are for geeks", etc.

> New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them.

It took a dotcom bubble to find the use cases we actually use today. Would you have not said the exact same thing back then about the internet?

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Nobody said that back then, no. They said there had been an over-exuberant market with people throwing stupid money at any old idea, but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" or even "we don't know the use-cases" because there were a ton of other useful, successful things going on with it.

You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway.

> but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust"

Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine:

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

> You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway.

I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-) Many people claim to know many things about history prior to their birth. I guess I'm one of these people.

> Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine:

And he caught a bunch of shit for it, even at the time. You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s.

> I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-)

What's the name of this "history of the internet" course(s) you took? The most historical context I ever got consisted of maybe a few intro paragraphs on Arpanet in my networking 101 class.

> You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s.

People today are as illiterate about economics as they were about the Internet back in the 90s. Just look around and see how many people know what Austrian econ is.

"Media history" would be the English translation. It wasn't about the technical origins of the internet which are irrelevant in this discussion.

They studied the impact on a few big media inventions (printing press, TV and the internet) on (western) culture. It seems you don't believe I had this in University? You can find some information here: https://docplayer.nl/2209094-Studiegids-2013-2014-communicat...

The subject is called "Mediageschiedenis" and you can find it on page 37. This document is unfortunately in Dutch.

Then he was an idiot, because at the time email was already in heavy use and had been for years, and had had a massive effect on business communication and the economy. Unless for some reason you don't count email as part of 'the internet'?

I was working back then, in 2003. The view on the ground was that SV had blown its head, but the rest of the world was just getting on with it. In fact most of the tech industry didn't even notice or care.

If you want to talk about whether web-based commerce was looking feasible, well even that was healthy enough - amazon was there and people were using it more and more, though clearly it wasn't as big as it is today.

So no, there was no feeling that 'the internet' wasn't going to be such a huge thing. There was a pessimism about some aspects of web commerce.

But I guess that's not as catchy a tagline as "It's like the early internet!"

I was there. By the time the dotcom bubble burst, the Internet was already everywhere, having steadily grown as a household technology since first introduced to the general populace just a few years earlier.

The dotcom bubble was then precisely a symptom of the Internet's runaway success: Everyone wanted to use it, massive amounts of money were being made with it, and so everyone thought they could make money with it as well. As a result, even the stupidest ideas got funding.

When the bubble burst, it caused a significant economical upset. It did not have any really noticeable effect on the Internet itself, its usage, and the availability of most of the services that were actually in use. I don't think anybody remembers a time where Internet usage "dipped" from its massive momentum since the mid-90s, because the dip was largely economic.

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