Internet at NPR (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Internet at NPR (1994)

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72 pointsrbanffy28 comments

If you read the actual memo (as opposed to the transcription below it), there's no "The". It's interesting that whoever did the transcription put in the definite article, because usage has changed in the last twenty years.

(The memo as a whole, it seems, goes back and forth between "the Internet" and just bare "Internet".)

I actually came to the comments just to talk about this. Not the flip-flop in the article you're pointing out, but I've often wonder when the switch happened in general. Old articles and even TV[1] will use Internet without the definite article. Then, sometime in the mid-late 90's, we started placing 'The' out in front.

My guess would be that techies originally did not use the definite article because other networks existed and had their own names. FidoNet, BITNET, etc. Thus 'Internet' was just a name to distinguish between other networks. Then, as the mainstream population started using Internet and saw that as the sole go-to network, it became 'The' Internet.

[1] http://youtu.be/fxfhInhkvtM

As someone doing scientific computing back then, you nailed it. We distinguished Internet from the other networks already in use.

It's been fun to watch the E-MAIL --> E-Mail --> E-mail --> e-mail --> email transition

You and I have different ideas of what's fun ;)

The different perceptions of what a ;) suggests is also fun to watch.

You're right. I'm still engaged by the "Internet" vs. "internet" debate.

I don't bother to debate it anymore. I just write "internet".

Just like I write "web", "blog", "electricity", and "debate".

(I do however capitalize "I". Because narcissism.)

I write "Internet". It's not one of a class of things, it is _the_ thing. Similarly I'll capitalize Earth, Moon, Sun, and Solar System when referring to the specific planet humans live on, moon orbiting that planet, the star they both orbit, and the solar system containing them all. But there's also "earth" as in dirt, and generic moons of other planets, and suns of other solar systems.

It's also interesting to note that the Internet is a superclass -- it's a network of networks (you'll discover this if you dig into BGP and realize what ASNs represent). And for networks connected via TCP/IP and BGP, it's the superclass of all such networks and a universal.

If it were to fragment, or one or more independent networks were to emerge, or sufficiently off-planet networks would develop that couldn't directly participate in terrestrial Internet traffic, that's going to remain the case.

Who even puts a dash between the e and mail nowadays?

"I'll just email you instead"

I sometimes use a hyphen. I would never use a dash in that fashion. The National Society for Grammatical Correctness would like to invite you to our re-education camp. After a fun day of hand-sorting hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes, you will collapse onto your hard concrete slab knowing that punctuation is as important to the sentence as spelling is to the word--and also that Grammar Nazis are jerks.

But the real question is why we haven't simply dropped the 'e' altogether and differentiate it from the physical shipment of papers by calling the latter "postal mail" or "snail mail" or "paper mail" or something else reflecting its reduced status as a means of communication.

There is only one dash/em/en/hyphen. ASCII has overruled the NSGC.

If we're going to be pedants, it's a HYPHEN-MINUS. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/002d/index.htm

The New York Times only just dropped the hyphen:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/23/5022332/the-new-york-time...

Worse (imo) was their long-time refusal to use the term "weblog" for such sites even though the inventors of the word, years before there were any articles about them, had always spelled it as one word, leading to such awkward copy as "a Web log, or 'blog'". The willingness to accept one neologism at face value ("blog") but not its ancestor ("weblog") reveals an unhealthy tendency to favor false logic ("we call it the World Wide Web, so it must be 'Web log'") over the actual history and usage of a word. Style guides should be about improving clarity, but changing the capitalization and adding a space to a new word is only going to cause confusion.

It hardly matters now that the original variant "weblog" is basically gone from actual usage, but I think it's a useful glimpse into the editors' mindset.

I still have trouble when writing - is it email, eMail, or Email?

I do. I can send you an e-mail confirmation if you'd like.

You forget that small little phase where it was e-Mail for a spell.

Ah yes, the days when "Internet" books for the general public had sections about Gopher, Veronica, Email, HTML, FTP, Archie, Telnet, WAIS…

"...such that any statistic on the numbers of connected computers and users is obsolete before the numbers are uttered."

This quote struck me as a little over the top; was such parlance common in those days? Certainly the Internet's growth was shocking, but this sentence seems more spirited, like something from a 90s hacker movie.

To some extent, that's what it was like. There was a feeling of the future happening faster than our eyes could take it in. I would be you'd see similar hyperbole discussing micro computing in the 80s, space flight in the 60s and jet flight in the 50s. The 70s and 00s seem to have suffered from no optimistic technology boom. I hope the teens fixes that.

As a boy, I was fond of a quote to the effect of "If all technology had progressed as quickly as computer technology, you would be able to buy a Space Shuttle at the corner store, fold it up and put it in your pocket, and fly it to Mars on a gallon of gas."

That was from the late '80s. By now, presumably, your gallon of gas would get you to Alpha Centauri.

I also find it kind of depressing that the excitement over the infinite potential of the Net has settled down to workaday humdrum.

> your gallon of gas would get you to Alpha Centauri.

In less than an hour ;-)

This was the age of an email which would list new WWW sites -- compiled by hand, daily.

The number of Internet hosts had recently surpassed one million, in 1993, and would top 10 million by 1997 -- growth was rapid.

So, yes, you were probably seeing hundreds to thousands of hosts being added daily during this period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_host_count_1988-...

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

"Holy shit, the hosts file I just started tftping from nic.ddn.mil is over a megabyte now! Gonna take me an hour to transfer that!"

I love how you have to attend an hour long class and file a form to get an npr email address :) It's interesting to see the difference between whats portrayed in the memo and what today is like where the internet is fairly common place and accepted.

This reads like a proper email...but I'm guessing the memo itself had to be passed around as paper. It's measure of how much things have changed that I had to stop and think about how that actually worked...then I remember in the early 2000s, in the newsrooms and offices I worked in, we had physical "inboxes", and office assistants who spent their day walking around and passing out printouts and faxes. I wonder how long until people will have a hard time remembering how letters through the post were sent?

It reads like a proper email because emails are memos ;-)

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