The women who coined the expression 'surfing the internet' (2019)
surfertoday.com
surfertoday.com
And Mark McCahill was a ardent Windsurfer, which resulted in this shirt, designed by his partner Wendy Jedeckila, way back in 1991!
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10274778...
There's no author information besides "Editor at SurferToday" in the HTML metadata. I understand that some people may wish to publish anonymously, but I think if you used a pseudonym like John Surfer it would at least feel like an actual person wrote it in our current era of AI-generated articles.
There's no date of publication. Of course the page itself may change with any CSS/template change and one of the great things of URLs is that you can modify the article with more recent information, still, having a date is kind of important.
There is no attribution. So is this an article of someone who interviewed her personally or is it a transcription of the video? The video is not by Surfer Today, it's from a channel called "Imagining the Digital Future Center" with 900 subscribers, but the actual brand on the video is called Internet Hall of Fame.
I've seen so many articles like this and it always feels so strange to me for some reason.
It's not too much a stretch to go from channel surfing to internet surfing.
Similar phrases that were, as it were, in the water at the time: bar surfing, bedroom surfing, boy/girl surfing.
I suspect a lot of these usages were regional, I know "bedroom surfing" was something I heard while living in Los Angeles. But "bar surfing" (and bar hopping) was common in the south as well.
Not trying to take anything away from anyone who first published the internet variations of this. But it was a thing before the internet.
"The LAN that time forgot"
https://archive.org/details/CaptainInternetAndCERFBoyNumber1...
"Humm, strawberry...what a mess!"
this comic is solid gold
"Surfing the internet" would probably be considered "unauthorised scanning" by someone.
Yes, we called and talked to someone on the PHONE at Yahoo.
No, we did not get a separate category.
We didn't use the word in the same syntactical manner - things make you cringe, or are cringeworthty - but I can assure you that my very British mother was using the word properly to refer to the same kind of things back then.
(And as a UK teen back then... yes, I cringed at the term!)
They would say "I'm on insta"
The Internet-connotation comes from the "Cyberspace" in William Gibson's novel "Neuromancer", where it was supposed to be jacked into the brain: thereby the connection to biological control systems, and thus cybernetics.
I personally cringe at most modern uses of "cyber-". The only I don't to is "cyberpunk", which refers to environments and aesthetics as in novels such as Neuromancer.
What the heck is going on with this "age cohort" crap? The guys pumping out the technology in the 90s were born in the 50s and 60s.
It was news to over 90% of the population, nothing to do with age. Sheesh.
Browsing the internet like just browsing in a store.
I guess we use Browsers to Browse the internet.
> You pay what we pay — you won’t find better value.
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/can-i-tranfer-a-premium-d...
For many of us, it was more like the "Information Country Road" with the speeds we had. I don't think I had ADSL access until 2006/2007 sometime, then it actually felt like a super highway. But before that, "paddling the Internet" would have been more accurate.
Of course, we weren't on there for the books, but for the people.
Even at 1200 baud you could be more or less instantly transported to university systems all across the country.
— Chip Douglas, The Cable Guy
Well, sadly, that very example is impossible in practical terms.
Of course the assumption being that the author of the quote was somewhere far away from Vietnam.
Most of the issue is with jitter, not latency. If you had a dedicated point-to-point link to your friend in Vietnam you could play a flawless game of Mortal Kombat for sure!
The meme "surf the internet" gained wide currency pretty much immediately.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Surf+the+Inter...
And a 1994 book title used it: https://www.amazon.com/Surf-Internet-Bundle-Neil-Randall/dp/...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme
[1] https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/a-brave-new...
I mean, who talks like that?
(I did have one especially goofy friend once confide in me that he had been "surfing the nets")
"I must remember to get my information superhighway connected as soon as I move into my new apartment!"
"Hey is your information superhighway dropping out? Mine is."
"Did you hear Jenna had her pictures leaked on the information superhighway?"
But yeah, never used by a real world person.
/s
I miss how fun the internet used to be. There is something lost with the current torrent of entertainment that is readily fed through popularity based algorithms. Hacker news is about as close as I get to that feeling, but it’s not the same since it’s completely hub and spoke. Youtube can come close in a similar way, if you stay away from shorts. But, what I really miss, is how often I found myself falling off the web into other places on the internet. gopher and telnet and archie. There were these other places to explore, and because the net was so much smaller it made sense to explore.
FWIW, I’ve had a similar sensation playing on a shared minecraft server recently, the stuff people build is so varying and interesting.
There are a lot of extremely niche things on the internet still and I agree that Youtube (and Nebula!) are where they mostly reside. Sadly gone are the days when just typing up some rudimentary HTML would qualify as engaging content to most people... I met my wife on a MUD - but now you need webcams, editors and production value to make content.
> The mouse pad was designed by Steve Cisler, who had been hired at the Apple Library as librarian. However, Apple thought the title librarian was too boring and so named him an Information Surfer.