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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

We had a ubiquitous continental data network back then. You can see it in operation in the old historical film, "You've Got Mail". The floppy installation disks were so plentiful they probably form a sedimentary stratum future geologists will use to identify the era.

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That was 1995. In 1991, we had the ubiquitous intercontinental phone network, but overseas connections were >$1/minute and data rate was only 9600 baud.

Still, email and usenet sort of worked. I have sent my first international email in 1993, from a school lab in my home town in Siberia. In larger cities, I bet there were ways to do it even earlier.

Stretching the definition a little, satellite TV had been a thing for years by then. Neiman Marcus was selling satellite dishes in 1979.

Satellite TV, being unidirectional, can hardly be called communication.

There was a satellite ISP for a time. The satellite box had a modem in it and your outbound traffic went out over the modem and the inbound traffic came down to the dish.

One-way communication is still communication. Broadcast TV is still used today.

Yeah, I was thinking the people who were showing this advanced tech thing were also likely the ones who could extrapolate where online was going.

But did they imagine that many techies a few decades in the future would be interested in the home video they were making?

only as much as you think Kubernetes will be a historical fascination 200 years from now.

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