Comments on: "Alison, can you explain what internet is?"

"Alison, can you explain what internet is?"

ricochet biscuit — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:49:00 -0800

Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, in the distant era of 1994, try to puzzle out what "internet" is. They should have asked Peter Mansbridge and Bill Cameron at the CBC, who had reported a year earlier about this revolution in which fifteen million people were taking part.

Boy, the sight of Telix takes me back.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:52:01 -0800

Anyone remember Kermit?

By: mhoye

mhoye — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:54:10 -0800

The sad fact of the matter is that NBC Universal is still trying to figure out what the internet is.

By: Potomac Avenue

Potomac Avenue — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:55:22 -0800

Needs to be remixed asap.

By: mhoye

mhoye — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:56:09 -0800

Sadly, Gopher support was dropped from Firefox partway through 2010.

By: nathancaswell

nathancaswell — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:01:14 -0800

Why is Gumbel so pissed off at Internet?

By: ThatCanadianGirl

ThatCanadianGirl — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:03:39 -0800

God, I miss Bill Cameron. That was a pretty good explanation for 1993. I like how "the" had not been added to "internet" yet.

By: StickyCarpet

StickyCarpet — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:03:49 -0800

Anyone remember Kermit? posted by Blazecock Pileon Yeah, and always keeping a null modem cable handy somewhere in the back of a drawer.

By: ThatCanadianGirl

ThatCanadianGirl — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:04:38 -0800

Gumbel was always pissed off at something.

By: nathancaswell

nathancaswell — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:10:07 -0800

I think we should start dropping "the" again. It sounds awesome and scary. Internet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

By: killdevil

killdevil — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:13:39 -0800

Anyone remember Kermit? I preferred zmodem, myself.

By: killdevil

killdevil — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:15:21 -0800

Screw explaining the Internet; can someone explain to me what the deal is with Katie's hair in that clip?

By: hal9k

hal9k — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:16:13 -0800

What is Gumball?

By: Joe Beese

Joe Beese — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:17:09 -0800

Awesome prescience from The Next Whole Earth Catalog in 1980: Computer networks are new telecommunications media for transmitting words and pictures. They're used to send messages, pass on news and gossip, search vast indexed data files, manage multinational businesses, bring together faraway compatriots, and take part in interactive fantasy games. They're being promoted hard by an army of international dreamers and at least 20 major corporations. They seem likely to change our lives more than any technology since the automobile.

By: kmz

kmz — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:17:31 -0800

Anyone remember Kermit? Of course... but once ZMODEM came around Kermit was left in the dust. Sadly, Gopher support was dropped from Firefox partway through 2010. :( Thankfully it looks like Lynx is still fully Gopher compatible. Aw yeah.

By: dflemingecon

dflemingecon — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:20:48 -0800

Man, Will Arnett was doing a spot on Bryant Gumble on Arrested Development when he did the whole Look at Banner, Michael! bit.

By: Liquidwolf

Liquidwolf — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:25:01 -0800

Forget the internet, can anyone tell me what Katie's hairstyle is all about? New wave soccer mom?

By: empath

empath — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:32:08 -0800

Why is Gumbel so pissed off at Internet? Because he hates nerds.

By: killdevil

killdevil — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:36:33 -0800

Screw explaining the Internet; can someone explain to me what the deal is with Katie's hair in that clip? Forget the internet, can anyone tell me what Katie's hairstyle is all about? New wave soccer mom? Lollerskates. But really, the nineties don't seem remote at all until you look carefully at hair and clothing styles.

By: krautland

krautland — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:36:43 -0800

drop the 'the.' it's what made facebook great.

By: bstreep

bstreep — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:46:01 -0800

You can also use the internet to look for jobs.

By: tustinrick

tustinrick — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:47:22 -0800

back before 19994,I remember when Mathowie asked me for a new computer and said the internet is here and what till you see my new web-page!

By: TurkishGolds

TurkishGolds — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:48:44 -0800

That reminded me of this clip (audio NSFW, "F" word) from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. This was hilarious and perfectly timed in 2001. Spoiler alert, according to Ben Affleck's character: "The Internet is communications tool, used the world over, where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another."

By: Sailormom

Sailormom — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:50:08 -0800

Katie Couric seems to be channelling Conan O' brian's hair in some weird internet/tv time warp.

By: hippybear

hippybear — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:01:14 -0800

I still find it a bit strange that in 1993 people didn't know what the internet was. I mean, I guess I can look back at those days a bit... people would look at me a bit strange when I would tell them about using email.. Or when I tried to explain my virtual life on irc... And when I told people that I met my partner via a mailing list, the words would have no meaning... But by that time, I'd been online in various ways for, what? 7 or 8 years? It's probably the only time in my entire life that I've truly been ahead of the curve.

By: briank

briank — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:08:53 -0800

I note how Gumbel manages to change the subject as soon as he is given the out by talking about the earthquake (which I presume is the Northridge quake, from the date of the video). Stupid Internet.

By: Ad hominem

Ad hominem — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:19:27 -0800

Was there a BMODEM? Maybe it was specific to commodore BBSs , I can't find any references to it at all on the net.

By: Ad hominem

Ad hominem — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:26:49 -0800

Also Punter. There is still sz and rz.

By: killdevil

killdevil — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:30:50 -0800

The Internet is communications tool, used the world over, where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another." Plus ça change...

By: norm

norm — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:33:02 -0800

I remember telling someone in about 1986 that this BBC email business was totally worthless, but if you could figure out how to make email work ACROSS the BBCs and just go straight to your Commodore 64, man, that would be pretty cool.

By: Dr. Zira

Dr. Zira — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:33:42 -0800

I wouldn't have bothered watching the Today show in 1994, as I was probably too busy using my Prodigy account to discuss the films of Quentin Tarantino with anonymous creepy strangers who probably still lived with their mums.

By: tommasz

tommasz — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:33:59 -0800

True story: Back in 1994, I worked for a small company whose owner's brother was a reporter for the local PBS station, WXXI. They had heard about "this Internet thing" and were looking for someone who could explain it to them. Conveniently, I was a graduate computer science student at RIT and the graduate labs had Internet access (recently upgraded to include DNS!). So they asked me to show them the Internet. First thing was getting permission to bring a film crew into the graduate lab. I asked my department chair if it was okay to do so. His answer was what the heck, it's better to seek forgiveness than ask permission. So the minor annoyance of my fellow grad students, I spent a couple of hours talking with a reporter while they filmed us accessing the net. At the time the WWW was still new and most sites were text and a few graphics. But the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) actually had sound files you could play so that was one of the sites I showed them. Luckily, the Sun SPARCstations we had could play sound files (remember the .au format?). It was the most exciting thing I could think of. We also talked about a few of the other services available at the time, including email, FTP and USENET. Ahh, USENET. The camera zoomed into the list of newsgroups I had up and landed on the alt.sex.* hierarchy. Of course. It became part of the graphic design for the segment. Another area of discussion was the impending change from control of the Internet by the National Science Foundation to the public. I don't recall exactly what I said, but I guarantee it was wrong, or at least shortsighted. Ha! Oh, and they filmed me back at my company as background. I didn't know what else to do so I spent most of the time checking a circuit with an oscilloscope. It looked high tech, at least.

By: norm

norm — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:34:04 -0800

I can't believe that in between the time I looked at this, got back to it, and commented someone else had already made a Commodore reference. +++

By: Senator

Senator — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:39:04 -0800

All he seems most sure about is that people are afraid to go to sleep. The wheel in the sky keeps on turning!!

By: l33tpolicywonk

l33tpolicywonk — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:40:09 -0800

Metafilter: What, do you write to it, like mail?

By: Ad hominem

Ad hominem — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:42:35 -0800

Wow nostalgia, before I got on the internet,around the same time as dial up BBSs I used to connect to Message boards and chat systems via commercial x25 networks like Telenet and Tymnet. These services has dial up numbers all over the world, from the prompt you could connect to systems all over the world. These systems mainly ran PRIMEOS and VMS. As I said these were commercial networks so you you typically needed a billing code to connect to a machine, but there were thousands that accepted "collect" connections. There were chat systems with dozens or hundreds of users on at once, there were BBSs set up on hacked vaxen by 10 year old kids. If you ever used Compuserve you used an x25 network.

By: l33tpolicywonk

l33tpolicywonk — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:43:09 -0800

Metafilter: a channel to Internet.

By: Ad hominem

Ad hominem — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:52:15 -0800

Check this And thisout if you have any interest in x25. The two big hacker hangouts were ALTOS and QSD, Both run in west Germany I think

By: arcticseal

arcticseal — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:52:37 -0800

Anyone remember Kermit? It was all downhill after Pigs in Space.

By: cavalier

cavalier — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:57:36 -0800

Oy vey! The '94 Earthquake! ha ha! There are still logs of that IRC channel.. with my name splattered all over it... woooooo google search, irc logs. Pardon me while I look at all my dorky "I'M ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF THE INTERNET, I'M ON IRC WITH SCRIPTS!" inanity.. Gosh, Mr. Gumbell was practically violent about the at sign.

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:58:16 -0800

The sad fact of the matter is that NBC Universal is still trying to figure out what the internet is. Hah. QFT. I remember when every 3rd newspaper article started with a dummies-guide-level description of what the internet is. Drive me insane.

By: ebear

ebear — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:58:49 -0800

You need to bear in mind that the NBC Newsroom at that time were using the BASYS system which worked kind of like a very simple version of "Internet" - it connected to all the newsrooms worldwide, you could top o' line instant message anyone on the system and get live news feeds from Reuters / AP and search Lexis Nexis. There was much grumbling when the system got upgraded in the late 90's.

By: symbioid

symbioid — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:59:14 -0800

Speaking of gopher and old protocols... Anybody wanna help me get my Gopherspace social network idea up and running (IOW, do all the actual work ;P) I think it would bring the memories and joy back, get rid of all this stupid Facebook, commerical, mass popularity social network, and make everything nice and new again. Fuck diaspora. Let's make it really hard to grok, so only we who dare to venture can do so!

By: symbioid

symbioid — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:00:11 -0800

Oh and speaking of the @ sign... notice it wasn't the @ sign, but literally a small a with a circle around it?

By: Ad hominem

Ad hominem — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:02:15 -0800

Fuck diaspora. Let's make it really hard to grok, so only we who dare to venture can do so! Finger Protocol

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:19:45 -0800

Anyone still running finger? Hands up? Anyone?

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:21:33 -0800

(I can't find any scripts that integrate finger and twitter. Internets, you have disappointed me)

By: Ad hominem

Ad hominem — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:26:40 -0800

Google has web finger no idea if anyone uses it.

By: mistersquid

mistersquid — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:33:07 -0800

Anyone remember Kermit?

Anyone still running finger? Hands up? Anyone?

What's thin, green and smells like pork? I'm sorry and promise never to do that again.

By: madajb

madajb — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:46:11 -0800

Was there a BMODEM? Maybe it was specific to commodore BBSs , I can't find any references to it at all on the net. xmodem, zmodem, ymodem, ymodem-g, ymodem-1k, c-modem. I don't recall a BMODEM. There was a Compuserve B, back when people still paid for that sort of thing.

By: ymgve

ymgve — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:50:58 -0800

I was surprised to discover that John Carmack did his last .plan update in 2005. He held out longer than most.

By: humanfont

humanfont — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:00:41 -0800

I miss listservs, usenet, IRC, MUDs, and most of all Archie. The web ruined it all. Go back to AOL you bastards.

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:04:35 -0800

Looks like there's still a finger server running at mit.edu. Think it gives the same data as their people directory, but I'm impressed it's still running.

By: Senor Cardgage

Senor Cardgage — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:10:27 -0800

"Look at Internet, Michael!" — Gob Bluth.

By: tustinrick

tustinrick — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:17:59 -0800

EGYPT knows how to pull the plug on the Internet!

By: treepour

treepour — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:32:13 -0800

Two trivial observations: 1) Bryant Gumbel still irritates the beejezus out of me. 2) They all looked and sounded so . . . bored.

By: Night_owl

Night_owl — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:34:29 -0800

Ok, so it's fine to be kind of unsure what internet is, if you're in 1994, though to be in media and not know is kind of weird. What is really strange to me is not knowing what @ means or referring to it as the "internet address" or saying "violence at nbc ge com" and not saying "dot" in there. How long have we said "dot"?

By: penduluum

penduluum — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:52:52 -0800

How long have we said "dot"? It wasn't always the standard usage.

By: oonh

oonh — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:01:57 -0800

how is internetty formed?

By: rh

rh — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:03:09 -0800

Bah. In 1994, I was promised that the future was going to be multimedia CD-ROMs, not the Internet.

By: zinfandel

zinfandel — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:24:48 -0800

I'm pretty sure that Timothy Leary explained the internet to me in 1984. At least I think that was the internet he was talking about.

By: spaceman_spiff

spaceman_spiff — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:30:51 -0800

Looks liketory, but I'm impressed it's still running. There's two domains you can finger, actually, one with the usual unix finger info and one with people directory info (class year, department, etc). Very useful, since most of our computer labs run an Ubuntu-based distro.

By: Combustible Edison Lighthouse

Combustible Edison Lighthouse — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:34:50 -0800

Anyone still running finger? $ finger @any.io

By: scalefree

scalefree — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:59:20 -0800

Check this And thisout if you have any interest in x25. The two big hacker hangouts were ALTOS and QSD, Both run in west Germany I think. You could actually reach them from the Internet if you knew how. Two ways I knew of were the UK's JANET & Motorolla's ftpbox.mot.com, both of which had telnettable X.25 PADs.

By: BobbyVan

BobbyVan — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:09:40 -0800

I love Katie Couric making a fist and slamming it into her open palm when the off-screen producer is explaining the Internet in a roundabout way. You know she just wants to scream, "get to the fucking point!"

By: Hardcore Poser

Hardcore Poser — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:38:06 -0800

This pretty much captures the feeling of 1993 for my geek friends and myself:

For years they've been saying these things would change the world; would mature from adding machines and typewriters to tools of the human spirit. Now, maybe it's coming true; because of Internet.

'Missing definite article' aside, what an opening line. Bill Cameron was a great newswriter.

By: weathergal

weathergal — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:40:20 -0800

I love the CBC bit explaining emoticons. I got my first e-mail address my freshman year of college (1993-1994). Not long after that I started getting forwards from my friends with the standard "if you don't send this on to 10 people right now, puppies will die" stuff. Then Dad and others in the older generation started in on that about a decade later. Now people post that kind of stuff in the status messages on facebook and try and guilt you by saying "only 1% of people will repost this and therefore most people don't care about veterans/homeless/puppies/whatever". Sorry folks, after almost 20 years I'm numb to that sort of thing. Thank you, internet.

By: ovvl

ovvl — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:48:11 -0800

The CBC website is glitchy. Peter Mansbridge has always been a big bald dork. Many years ago, when he first debuted as an anchor on the CBC, he interviewed a little old lady, who as a young child had survived the sinking of the Titanic. He asked her what happened to her father? She replied: "He drowned."

By: asterix

asterix — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:49:05 -0800

No discussion of '90s-era tech nostalgia is complete without a link to AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign. I'm actually really impressed at how accurate the predictions turned out to be. (And I have fond memories of using Gopher to access the NNTP server at Florida State. See, my school had a censored newsfeed...)

By: Ad hominem

Ad hominem — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:55:49 -0800

There was a Compuserve B, back when people still paid for that sort of thing. I am probably getting C-modem and Compuserv B mixed up together. I'm considering buying this book.

By: SNWidget

SNWidget — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:02:24 -0800

Not long after that I started getting forwards from my friends with the standard "if you don't send this on to 10 people right now, puppies will die" stuff. One of my greatest moments in my proto-internet life was writing one of these, adding some fake forward headers, and sending it from my AOL account. I was such a proud father (at the age of 11) when it came back to me, having made the rounds.

By: Ad hominem

Ad hominem — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:07:54 -0800

$ finger @any.io Pretty cool, but this is a special kind of twisted genius.

By: SisterHavana

SisterHavana — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:51:15 -0800

I remember sitting in the computer lab at IU, sending BITNET messages back and forth with my friends. And the VAXPHONE!

By: jeremy b

jeremy b — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:21:34 -0800

Had this very same conversation with my grandfather last week.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:28:58 -0800

Awesome prescience from The Next Whole Earth Catalog in 1980: Some of us were alive back then, you know. It wasn't exactly an unusual take on things. Heck, Brand got The WELL going just five years later. I went online in late '81, and we all knew it was going to be big even before we got bang-pathed onto the internet. I'm much more meh about the anchors' confusion than others, I guess, because I remember having pretty much that exact same conversation with numerous people, over and over again. They'd ask you all sorts of far-out questions, too, in the early days, assuming you had to type everything in hexadecimal or that if you dialed in someone could remotely take control of your kitchen appliances.

By: robertc

robertc — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 02:54:03 -0800

Internet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. So you're saying an Internet Kill Switch is a good idea? How long have we said "dot"? When I started University in 1990 we were using it - my first ever email address was "robertc at ai dot ed dot ac dot uk" - so at least that long.

By: mikelieman

mikelieman — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 03:12:55 -0800

assuming you had to type everything in hexadecimal It was octal, and Fuck You CIS, that's why Delphi ruled ( until Murdoch got involved and fucked everything up... )

By: vbfg

vbfg — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 05:04:47 -0800

We use finger to control our public pcs at the university where I work. We can shut them down, get usage stats, tell them to download a new disk image from the network and a bunch of other cool stuff through it if it's done from the right network. finger command@ machinename. Custom daemon obviously. Off the shelf products have caught up with us a bit now but Im loathe to switch cos I still think the first daemon I wrote is pretty cool.

By: l33tpolicywonk

l33tpolicywonk — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 05:52:28 -0800

weathergal: "I love the CBC bit explaining emoticons. " Wait, I couldn't tell if you were kidding or serious. Could you use an emoticon? :-(

By: meehawl

meehawl — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:27:29 -0800

StickyCarpet: "Yeah, and always keeping a null modem cable handy somewhere in the back of a drawer" Just this week I had to set up Solaris and ZFS on a little NAS without any video output. So, digging in the bottom drawer, underneath the dusty tangle of *enormous* external SCSI-50s and parallel port cables I find, yes, an ancient null modem cable (with DE-9 and DB-25 and some weird 19-pin thing that make it massive). Then I have to rebuild a 2002-era PC which is basically the last thing in the house with a usable serial port. And after all that, it worked fine. I recall the last time I used that cable was 1990 or so, and that was to share out dialup SLIP to another PC. So anyway, yeah, null modem cables: keep them someplace warm and dry and they will last *forever*.

By: dgaicun

dgaicun — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 23:04:40 -0800

In the distant era of 1994 no one knew what a "VCR" was either. They had to use video cameras to record their TV sets.

By: Philofacts

Philofacts — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:01:28 -0800

Yup, one of the best examples of the contrast in quality between Canadian TV and US (Mansbridgean dorkiness notwithstanding.) It cracked me up to hear the guy being interviewed saying how polite people were on the forums back then - had Godwin's Law not been coined yet? I remember some rather intense flamewars even back when Usenet had less than 3000 forums... Ah, 1994. I was just a music nerd on the periphery of a crowd of net geeks. I'd recently got on the net with my Atari ST (yup, awesome MIDI computer with very tight timing, brains of my studio up 'til then) and a 9600 baud modem. Soon replaced with a Mac - digital audio.) Unix terminal emulation, ZMODEM, emacs, pine, lynx, etc. A friend said in late '93, "Have you checked out Mosaic yet?" The Northridge quake was the first event I heard about first via the net. Found a better place to live when a couple who worked at Wired posted a call on ba.housing on Usenet that winter to form a household, and five of us wired up a Victorian flat in the heart of SF with Cat-5 and an ISDN connection from sirius.com. (Later went with SDSL from PacBell to keep the server farm on the back porch going, when Sirius was ruined by acquisition and their tech support became some idiot in Texas reading from a script. I still miss the reliability of SDSL upload speeds vs. today's cable modems.) A later housemate had been a sysadmin at the WELL, and babysat render farms at Pixar and Pacific Data Images (something I'd end up doing on a more modest scale later in the decade when we turned the idle office network at the ad agency for which I did tech support into a Cinema 4D render farm at night.) A year later we were running a large information site from our living room, collaborating with scientists and journalists around the world, and out of the need to manage it came another housemate's launch of a HTML-extension web tools startup, with me as the first non-programmer alpha-tester of its code. It was a rapid education from '93 up to about '97. Lots of very loose talk in those days about the ways the net would change everything (fueled not just by Wired but by even woolier Mondo 2000 types - I wish I had tapes of some of the conversations at a Mondo party in '92 at their Maybeck mansion in the Berkeley hills; they would be truly cringe-worthy now.)

By: Philofacts

Philofacts — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:03:39 -0800

Anyone still running finger? Hands up? Anyone? I've used it a few times within the last decade...

By: suburbanbeatnik

suburbanbeatnik — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:19:27 -0800

For media people, Gumbel and Couric were pretty clueless. Maybe it was an age thing? In '93, in my first term of my freshman year at college, I was first introduced to the internet by various net geek friends, and I was a teenager who used to be obsessed with WarGames. My reaction to finding out about the net? I can't remember, but I think I probably just said "cool!" I got my first email address soon after-- and it's all been downhill ever since.

By: scalefree

scalefree — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:42:23 -0800

How long have we said "dot"? Around the time DNS was implemented in 1983 (see RFC 882 & 883). Prior to that addresses were typically expressed as a "bang path" of hosts connected via UUCP: sourcehost!connecthost!desthost!user. It was an explicit store-&-forward system, where you'd name not just the host but the path between you & that host. Each server along the path had scheduled connections to its list of "close" servers & would exchange traffic with each in turn, usually over dialup modems. Bang paths persisted until the early 90s before dying off with the emergence of a stable, open NSF backbone (thanks to Al Gore!). Imagine sending a letter with the name of each post office for it to pass through written on the envelope.

By: empath

empath — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:25:59 -0800

In 1994, I definitely already had a wired subscription (from issue 2 on) and was on GEnie. I don't actually remember when I actually got dial-up internet. (or broadband for that matter). I can't remember what life was like was before that, tbh.

By: Night_owl

Night_owl — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:35:30 -0800

scalefree That's all really interesting! Not quite what I was asking, though. I mean, like in an email address, when speaking it out loud, we say "name (at) domain (dot) com". But in the video, he just says "name (at) domain com". I was just wondering when that particular speaking convention happened.

By: scalefree

scalefree — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:42 -0800

I think he was leaving it out from ignorance, not common practice. My experience doesn't go quite that far back but I'm betting it pretty much coincided with the advent of DNS, 1983. Computer geeks have a long history of odd & prominent pronunciation of punctuation in a computer context - at, dot, bang, shebang, twiddle. Dot in particular saw spoken use going back to the early days of Unix with .dotfiles, & there would've been several years' precedent with IP numbers before DNS was added to the mix as well. So I don't have absolute proof but I gotta stick with my belief that it would've happened almost immediately among the ARPANET userbase as the new protocols & conventions for using them came into practice.

By: asciident

asciident — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:29:21 -0800

Although I was able to view it in time, the original Today Show video has been removed.

By: scalefree

scalefree — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 14:39:51 -0800

The Guy Who Posted The Hilarious Today Show 'What Is The Internet' Reportedly Fired By NBC.

By: scalefree

scalefree — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 14:42:56 -0800

NBC: Here's Why We Fired the "Today Show" YouTube Leaker.