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Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the infrastructure made during the Dotcom boom was shortly discarded. How many dial-up modems were sold in the 90s?

The current AI bubble is leading to trained models that won't be feasible to retrain for a decade or longer after the bubble bursts.

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The wealth the Dotcom boom left behind wasn't in dial up modems or internet over the telephone, it was in the huge amounts of high speed fiber optic networks that were laid down. I think a lot of that infrastructure is still in use today, fiber optic cables can last 30 years or more.

> fiber optic cables can last 30 years or more

The trenches for the cables even longer than that.

How much of it is still dark?

Honestly, not that many people had modems.

In the late 90s to 2001? Many people were still using modems at that time. Cable or DSL wasn't even an option for a considerable percentage of the population.

In 2000 6% of the population had access to internet.

In 2002 I was woking making webs and setting up linux servers and I did not have internet at home.

This is pretty location specific—in the US 42% of households had home internet in 2000.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/189349/us-households-hom...

That web is not a good source.

Yes it is.

Low Global Penetration: Only 361 million people had internet access worldwide in 2000, a small fraction of the global population. Specific Country Examples United States: The US had a significant portion of the world's internet users, making up 31.1% of all global users in 2000. Its penetration rate was 43.1%.

Not still using, flat out modemless. Lots of guys got their hand on a mouse for the first time only after Windows XP launched. Which was after the collapse.

Windows 95 didnt even have Internet by default.

It had the Microsoft network or whatever it was called.

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