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mattl

This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987.

EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.

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The internet effectively did not exist in 1987. Even the most tech savvy people didn’t have access.

That didn’t start to change until the early 90’s. Al Gore’s contribution was actually important.

Public access starts in the late 80s with things like The World and Netcom, but people were posting on the Internet in the 1980s. There's http://olduse.net where you can go and read old USENET posts from the era.

Right. And I had access to it at my university in 1988.

The popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the 70s and 80s, and into the very early 90s, when he was one of the first politicians to embrace and push legislation for it. He was definitely influential in its adoption and proliferation, insofar as politicians are important in funding all these things, and acting as evangelists. There's a pretty good Wikipedia article[1] about it all.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that,

> As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983.

> The popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the 70s and 80s

I think most people got it from this interview he did with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. At least that's how I remember it. The jokes started flowing the next day. The number of people who knew of his work on internet related legislation pales in comparison to those who heard him say this on a major TV network.

"I took the initiative in creating the internet"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnFJ8cHAlco

Yeah the joke/meme is clearly mocking that weird comment.

The narrative that OP has fallen for is so pervasive that I think it's probably misinformation created for damage control.

It's not that it's even a particularly bad lie as far as politicians go, but it is easy to prove it wrong and easy to makes jokes about it. So I think it could easily be considered damaging enough to warrant a specific PR effort.

Declan McCullagh, a now largely-forgotten libertarian opinion writer, seems generally responsible for the perception that Gore's claim was hyperbolic rather than the factual statement it actually is.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0603/Political-m...

I wasn't all that tech savvy but I was using the internet in 1985 when I was a university student. Oh, right, it wasn't called "the internet" and we used bang addresses for email and rcp instead of scp to copy files between hosts because security was physical locks on the room with the VAX in it, but it was continuous with what is today called the internet.

I was using internet email and Usenet in 1985. I wasn't "tech savvy" - I coded, but I didn't know much about the internet or email. I got access through a UK BBS system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange).

I first came across Usenet through my employment with Olivetti. They were selling AT&T Unix minis at the time, so we had a Usenet feed via AT&Ts office on the other side of the city. Two updates daily, I think.

[Edit] For home access to CIX, I was using a 1400-baud acoustic coupler, which I had "liberated" from the basement of a former employer. Bandwidth mattered in those days - you could DoS someone by sending them ten pages of text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

(Not one of those, but similar)

BBS was the thing then. Compuserve and such. Talker BBS chat boards run on "OMG WTF is that" stacks of C64 hardware (look up "commodore 64 1Megabyte RAM") or gronkulicious clusters of RBBS hosts.

There were UUCP gateways to netnews an mail built out of ignorance and Qbasic by some insane hacker but that was bout as deep as "internet" penetrated. "Joliet One" had a 3b2 but they were pretty restrictive with their feeds.

I mean, some people were using BBS but there are academics and others using the internet.

I had a C64 and my mom bought me a CompuServe starter kit at some point in the 80's. I think it was something like $6 an hour off-peak and over $20 an hour during peak hours, which might not even include long distance charges depending on where you were. That would be $20 an hour off-peak and over $60 peak in today's dollars. For 300 bits per second.

For practical purposes, the internet did not exist for people like me until the mid-90's.

University access.

My mom worked at a university when she bought me the C64 and the starter kit. Towards the end of this period, I was going to university. We did not have that type of access.

Some doubtless had access to the Internet in the late 70s/early 80s but random students generally did not even at universities that were connected to the Internet. When I was in school I remember someone at the AI Lab printing out a long Usenet thread related to Star Wars but I certainly didn’t have access. Indeed, outside of one class, I barely used a computer undergrad even as a non-CS engineering major.

For practical purposes smartphones don't exist for a lot of people today, but we're not saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.

If a smartphone cost a dollar a minute to use, we would be saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.

Edit: sorry, per minute, not per hour.

I'm sure there are places in the world where a smartphone basically costs way more than that.

Just because your access was a dollar an hour, does not mean it didn't exist.

Out of curiosity, what kind of hardware/software was included in a CompuServe starter kit?

Hopefully someone else can answer this better than I can, but from what I remember, there was no hardware included. You had to buy an old style modem separately, like something out of Wargames.

Then you got software that allowed you to connect along with an hour of connection time.

Sure, but pre-"everyone is online always". Even things that happened in 2005, at the start of Reddit and Digg and well into the reign of MySpace, weren't summarized and consolidated as efficiently as they are today.

Sure. But we don't describe pre-smartphone as pre-telephone.

yeah i dont see whats so hard about speaking accurately.

This is funnier than it should be.

Wikipedia:

> Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.

I think the internet era is generally taken to be from 1995 on

That’s the rise of the web though. 1995 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start shipping with browsers preinstalled.

It’s not much of an internet without mass participation though

As someone who was online in 1987, I've found the internet significantly less enjoyable as it has become filled with "regular people", hoping to share the knowledge they don't have with people who didn't ask for it in the first place.

While I get what you're saying, there was also a time and place where you could wonder aloud how to do $technical_thing_x on $platform_y and get a knowledgable, competent response from a skilled professional who had done that thing. Now, we sift through thousands of pages of sloppy copy pasta, of unknown pedigree and unknown efficacy. Was that for the best?

or go to HN, and ask.

don't ask, simply answer the question you have wrong.

The bulk of humanity have been endowed with sci-fi superpowers thanks to Wikipedia, Google, Google Maps, remote work, shopping from home, etc.

As for the nerds who lost their online paradise? They are now in insane demand, earning eye-watering salaries and company valuations, and rising to the top of the social ladder.

It’s not perfect, but it is bloody good.

True and we can still find our niche places to chat with peers like some forums and IRC servers. The communities are still there.

What bothers me a lot more though is that the mainstream internet has become a massive dystopian surveillance machine.

1994-95 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start shipping with a TCP/IP stack preinstalled.

Isn't 1995 when the <img> tag was introduced to HTML, and when commercial use of the internet (read: advertising) was first permitted?

I can't find any substantiation for the Gates quote "The internet is just a passing fad", which is often dated to 1995, but apparently never cited.

No. Commercial use was 89.

That wasn’t even the start of the web era, let alone internet era.

For context, GeoCities went live in 1994.

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