“Recipes” - it’s always, always there in these kind of things, and makes me laugh every time.
It's amazing just how quickly you can catch the under estimation of the internet's potential. Within the first sentence, starting with the word "imagine", the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline, rather than creating and sharing it within the internet itself. In the furthest stretches of the imagination, the prediction still falls very short. No criticism to anyone in 1994, it's just fascinating how difficult it is to peer far into the future.
> the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline
Its because 1990s world was still the feudal, one-way world in which large corporations dominated everything and the users 'knew their place' and consumed content and products. Occasionally, a corporation would stoop low as to ask users' feedback to improve their product. And people would praise and elevate that corporation as being 'caring for their customers'. That was it. The extent of users' say in anything.
Early Internet still reflected that world order. It was a one way street in which the people consumed what the corporations produced. There weren't even comment forms under any article in any prominent publication. After all, who are you, a lowly pleb, to comment under an article in which a glorious, 6-figure columnist from the 'right background' wrote. Know your place.
User-generated content lived in the fringes of the Internet in those days. It was the plebs' place. The unwashed.
Then comes blogging. Social media. User-generated content starts to dominate and becomes de-facto content. Everything turns upside down. We are living in its aftermath, in which its even hard to imagine how one-way the early Internet was.
GeoCities started taking off in early 1996, at the same time NYTimes.com started publishing. Of course there was AOL and personal webpages before that.
I hear "knew their place" and all I can think of is that they knew they were watching ads... now many people think that all their content is free (like information wants to be ;^) not realizing they are are the product being sold.
It's not like tiktok/Insta or the news/blog promotional articles are anything but ads... people just don't "know their place" any more.
I think Bowie's prediction for the impact of the internet was not too far off the mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHcOs7mhfU
The parent comment is 6 minutes, but the full 15 minute interview (about more the the internet) is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLf6KZmJyrA
Napster came into existence in '99
This video certainly isn't the most profound take on the future of the internet at that time. By this point people were predicting just about everything we have now. Mainstream coverage of that has always sounded out of touch.
Kind of makes me wonder what would those people say if we played them Bo Burnham's Welcome to The Internet from 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
As early as 2003, popular culture was catching on to the fact that the ‘information superhighway’ had some potholes:
Issues with the Internet date to its origins ... and inventors. Paul Baran in the 1960s, amongst others, whom I've compiled here:
<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193>
Sources / instances date to the 1980s or earlier, addressing specifically the false assertion by many that "nobody saw this coming".
I bet that lady would be pretty amped up about the streaming video quality. And all the Bill Clinton saxophone videos she could watch on there.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CRatTuWdT_Q
Also thanks for getting Bo stuck in my head for the rest of the day. That song has all the answers.
And I am even more excited by thinking about what the internet will look like in 2031
Based on past experience, it is going to look a lot like the internet of today. Things just don't move that fast that 9 years will make much of a difference.
Like the internet today, but with more ads, more sponsored content, and more AI generated submarines.
For those unfamiliar, not as wet as you might think: <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13993>
Wow, the phrase "information superhighway" really brought me back. I hadn't heard that for quite some time!
Fun fact: Because of this phrase (In German „Datenautobahn“) the German digital ministry is docked to the ministry of transport…
I recently learned that one of the major competition regulators in Germany is called the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur or BNetzA), which oversees electricity, gas, telecommunications, post, and railway markets.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Network_Agency>
Given my own relatively recent realisation that virtually all industrial monopolies can be considered (sometimes with some mental gymnastics) as networks, this is an interesting bit of confirmation.
This makes sense. Cloud computing should be part of the Meteorology department!
The Department of Agriculture would beg to differ - clearly the oversight of server farms should be their responsibility.
Are these servers communicating internationally? The department of foreign affairs would like to have a word.
Shouldn't it be linked to the agricultural department because of the phrase "Neuland"?
Heavy "citation needed" here.
But it can only manage policies for Layer 4 and above, right? :)
That's amazing, I don't even care if its true.
Reminiscent of how New York transferred responsibility for the state canal system to the electric power authority because of NYSDOT mismanagement.
Check it out: https://www.bmvi.de/EN/Home/home.html
"Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport"
Shouldn't it be the ministry for infrastructure?
Doesn't confirm the "Because of this phrase" part of the claim.
OMG this is... quite the misunderstanding -_-'
Ironically, I just ran into this phrase last week while reading an anthropology paper from the 90's ("Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala")
Whenever I hear this phrase it reminds me the part in the book Cryptonomicon where the pretentious humanities professor feels so clever for asking "How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?"
Oh, ugh... Memories of all the awful road metaphor headlines of the time are flooding back-- "Breaking Down on the Information Superhighway", "Traffic Jams...",
Unfortunately that term brings an even more awful memory back for me and many others, as That enthusiasm was used for a brazen lie to the American public: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
Google Trends shows "information superhighway" is getting midly more popular again in recent time: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=informat...
I heard that so many times in the 1990's in France, "les autoroutes de l'information". I knew that politicians were running after what the USA do, but I did not realize that they were also translating and recycling the very same words.
I just realized it while watching that 1994 video :-)
And, as evident in the video, its considerable overuse. I cringed watching this every time she said it beyond the first few times.
I've been reading Douglas Copeland's 1994 novel "Microserfs" recently and there's a bit where the main character starts reading up on actual highway construction in response to the information superhighway.
Is it as good as Generation X ? Also I'd love Coupland to reiterate and do a 'Generation Z' about zoomers and digital natives.
I built a retro 486 PC, bought a modem and could not find any dial-up ISPs in Australia. The 19xx prefix is not dial-able using VoIP line that I set up (we don't have POTS lines anymore).
I would - unironically - love to build an 'early internet' where we could dial in (or just emulate it via an intentionally low-bandwidth, high-latency layer over home wifi). Go back to chat rooms, islands of communities centered around a particular topic.
There is a device you connect to your computer port and it can emulate dial up. It connects to your wifi but your computer sees it as a modem, then you type regular AT commands and instead of a number it connects to telnet BBSs.
You're in luck - here's a list of still-operative dial-up BBSes: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/bbs/connection/dial-up/list/b...
Well, you can built a new internet! Just find some more computers to connect to!
1. This brought me back. When she clicked into the "mall" and the navigation was an imagemap with hotlinks [1] going off to a flower shop, I immediately thought of a website that some guy payed me to build back in the 90's when I was in high school. He bought SellMemphis.com, SellAtlanta.com, etc and wanted to create a directory for local businesses. Also - good on you, Philips Flowers, for keeping 1800florals.com in what must've been intense pressure from 1800flowers.com!
2. We still can't buy items directly in-stream. However, product placement is huge, and not just for consumer goods. Music featured in Stranger Things ends up trending on Spotify. Apple creates a playlist (in its own platform) for "Defiant Jazz," featured in Severance, also on its own platform).
3. Regulation (or lack of regulation) played out in an interesting way. We now have an interesting problem with digital infrastructure in the US anyway, where copper cables (still) only get you so far, wireless is the new expectation, and countries that -had- no comms infrastructure are by default more modern now than large tracts of the US, because they skipped past the "telephone poll" phase straight to cell towers.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19990208003609/http://branch.com...
Cell towers are not a replacement for wired connections. There's only so much data rate you can have for a given frequency bandwidth[1]. Wires (or fibers) work around this because the medium isn't shared. Each wire has the entire spectrum for itself.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theo...
Oh absolutely! I guess I'm confusing my own point - which is / was that in some places cell towers are showing up -before- wireline connections.
I suppose it is easier to run one major fiber line to a cell than it is commit to FTTH. Still I though this was a half-deserved dig at how outside of cell-service many more rural parts of North America still top out at decades old ADSL, and the places that do have good broadband are often via cable tv infrastructure (DOCSIS). I suppose if someone did build new infrastructure from scratch they would just start at LTE/5G and laying fiber to the premises, why start anywhere else?
Anyone else pained by the fact that it's 28 years later and we STILL don't have fiber deployed widely? My parents are paying $65 / mo for 5mb dsl, and it's the best option they can get a stones throw outside of the city limits. Pathetic when you compare it to municipal broadband deployed everywhere with powerlines like in Chattanooga, TN
Yeah, absolutely ridiculous how slow the US has been regarding rolling out low-latency fiber. Granted, smaller countries could do it easier but even so, consumer fiber-optic connections have been around since the 2000s, and still it seems like it's mostly only available in bigger cities in the US.
A lot of the billions of dollars earmarked over the decades for telecom and cable companies was spent on dividends and buybacks rather than fiber rollout as intended.
We live a mile from facebook headquarters in the middle of silicon valley and our neighborhood just got fiber 6 months ago.
World Wide Web (or WWW) is too long to say and "The Web" never really caught on, but the Internet is not quite accurate. It feels like we need a word to differentiate IP from HTTP. Though, since we haven't come up with one yet, I guess we will just have to live with the WWW being called the Internet.
What exactly is your requirement for ‘the web’ catching on?
It’s used very often on ycombinator in submission titles and comments. I see it used by millennials and gen z on Discord, though more commonly as an adjective, eg ‘oh is it just web or is there an app?’
Sometimes they drop ‘the’ and it becomes “hey i saw this on web.” Online Korean comics are usually just called webtoons instead of manhwa. It’s used on corporate sites, ads, hotel amenities descriptions and in references to ‘the dark web.’
What more do you need?
"Web" absolutely caught on. Web browser, web site, web app, web designer, web developer, web cam, (we)blog, web comic, surfing the web. These are all words most people know and use.
I have a vague idea about the difference between WWW and the Internet but never very sure.
For example, I assume all the "apps" don't count as WWW? But some services (most?) have their web versions, so it's kinda hard to distinguish.
It has to do with what protocol they are using to communicate with the server/cloud/whatever. If they are using HTTP/S (hyper text transfer protocol) then it is web/www. Otherwise, it is some other protocol. For example, email (technically) uses SMTP (simple message transfer protocol).
However, all of these run on top of the Internet Protocol (IP). So, everything is internet, but not everything on the internet is http.
Apps are almost certainly using HTTP under the hood to communicate with their servers, so technically they are a part of the web, which is a part of the internet.
For a while, I remember "The Net" being used. It sounds very wrong now.
Probably due to that provocative movie on cable TV by the same name.
It had that girl from the bus.
That movie showed ip addresses with fields greater than 255!
>It feels like we need a word to differentiate IP from HTTP.
We really don't, because technical accuracy isn't relevant to the vast majority of people, who aren't discussing protocols to begin with.
And anyway,I think people stopped referring to "the internet" in general once it became ubiquitous enough that it became more useful to refer to specific sites instead, or genres of services like social media. I think the only time people use "the internet" anymore is in reference to their ISP, eg: "the internet" going down.
When I pause Netflix, why dont I have the option to purchase the clothes they are wearing on screen?
The much more wild thing is that Amazon Prime Video doesn't do this. The overall interface and concept is not far from the "X-Ray" view that Amazon already has... and, of course, they have a built in retailer you could order from.
Why don’t I even have the option to have friends on Netflix and make lists of movies I watch that I think they would like?
This has been tried ... numerous times. I recall a brief-lived CBS Interactive site / app in the late aughts. Went nowhere.
Most such interaction now occurs within extant social groups. Much as you'd watch a TV show or go to a theatre with friends, most people now discuss films on their self-centric social media. FB / Instagram / Reddit / Twitter, etc., usually with at least some people they know directly.
Conversing with absolute strangers has far less appeal.
They had this feature (sort of). I don't remember if you could recommend movies to others, but you could have friends and see each other's viewing history.
This is one of those features that people think they want, and would cost Netflix a ton of money, but would ultimately become filled with spam and would only have a small number of power users. It's a big money pit that does little to retain users and generate revenue. "More social" has been pitched to Spotify countless times and it would likely face a similar fate.
Gotta drink a verification can to enable it
Ubik ... Safe when taken as directed.
Because those aren't mass manufactured clothes sold at retail but something the costume department threw together specifically for that scene.
Becouse Netflix is not from China (I heard that chinese tiktok has exactly this option) - just a fun fact
It's just advertising, American's instagram has it too
Imagine the admin required to setup and manage something like that...
If implemented now, what about in 2032 when you're watching re-runs from 2022?
What if the store goes bust or styles change?
Deepfakes will solve this
Display advertising will show you products that you have expressed an interest in today.
Streaming video has ad slots similar to traditional linear TV because it's what people are used to. There is the opportunity to do much much more.
What I could see happening is content changing to be tailored to the viewer. This would both decrease subscriber churn in the increasingly competitive streaming space, as well as add a feature to advertise via the content itself.
You like the pants? Point your remote at them to purchase with a single click. Honestly, I could see Amazon sponsoring streaming content for that purpose. AWS has streaming services and Amazon has been doing the logistics for decades.
> the opportunity to do much much more
I envision clothing & hairstyles being changed in the same video from one year to another, or even customized per viewer demographic. Admins could simply toss some product links over and let the ML do its thing.
Of course, this would require a ton of standardization of product types and categories, which I could see being difficult to get consensus on. Perhaps one company/consortium would corner the market and just use human labor to fill the gaps where automation isn't ready, much as is often done today.
Surely that's a job that ML would handle easily?
Set up an API that allows anyone to tag videos and earn a commission in sales based on that tag. Let them figure out where it makes sense to invest the effort and how to automate it.
Spam would be a huge problem, of course.
Because we got NFTs instead.
Related are the AT&T "You will" commercials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2EgfkhC1eoHere is one of my favorite videos from the early days of the web. Two popular morning television hosts discuss the at-symbol and ask "what is internet, anyway?"
Funny to see the BBC complaining about "letting the market forces" build the internet. The said market forces didn't do too bad.
Considering that ARPANET and CERN were both government funded, I’d say market forces had little to do with it.
Yes, it was a government initiative to create a decentralised network. Getting ready in 1994 was over 20 years late.
Fun fact: Queen Elizabeth sent an email in 1976. Or more likely she pressed a button.
Not to mention BBC
Didn't Europe, with their combined industry and government coordinated plan, leap frog US connection speeds, where things were left only to the market?
Err, for a while, they didn't. But soon enough new gatekeepers and middlemen (GAFA, Paypal) returned which not only had we hoped to get rid of, but even paid public money (ARPA, CERN, W3C) and established net neutrality legislation for, in vain.
Without nationwide regulation to homogenize the network, it looks like it can be very perfectible (looking at the US).
You mean the oligopoly of big tech?
If it was government controlled, it would be even less diverse. Think of the original AOL, but country wide.
Disappointed to not find a flower shop at branch.com:1080
http://web.archive.org/web/19961020151638/http://branch.com/
Even the order form is still there, ready for your credit card. There's a link on the order form, "credit card concerns"...
> "...we feel that using a credit card here may be more secure than using it at your local restaurant. We don't know. We haven't had a problem in this area."
I guess "we don't know" covers them just in case things go wrong!
Pity - I used your link and tried hunting for the Mother's Day bouquet she was looking at but it wasn't archived.
Say it again!
The irony of watching this on my high speed fiber based internet connection while the host talks about the future where one can watch high quality video on high speed fiber connections.
The future is now!
I like the not so subtle dig at John Major's total lack of policy regarding the internet in 1994.
this is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A
Narrator: "They weren't"
I have that on my bookshelf. I particularly like that there's one chapter near the end on this new-fangled WWW thing.
i liked her light dig at the british govt for not having a modem or a policy on the internet. funny how different it is now with all the european regulation of the internet.
Yes, thank you Europe for the cookie popups.
Blame the industry for doing so much tracking and at the same time not developing an industry standard for automating user consent decisions.
Funny thing that sending an e-mail to the president (Brazilian president) was one of the first things I did when got online (1995). It was basically Playboy website and this till I found IRC :p
I miss programmes like Tomorrow’s World.
Interesting that the copper wires stuck around, UK's fibre optic rollout still ongoing not to be completed til 2026 or later
Inventions like mp3 probably helped to reduce the pressure to upgrade.
I think it would have more to do with Fiber to the Node allowing ISPs to only half-upgrade their infrastructure and still achieve workable broadband, even if having the foresight to do straight fiber would have been a much better goal to work towards at the time.
They were not, in fact, ready.
Port explicitly specified in at least one URL. Was HTTP without a standard port back in '94?
> On March 1990 they published the document RFC1060 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1060) where they listed the well-known ports at that time. In that list there wasn't a protocol assigned to port 80. It went from 79 to 81:
79 FINGER Finger
81 HOSTS2-NS HOSTS2 Name Server
> In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee issued the first version of HTTP in a document about HTTP 0.9 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html) where he stated:
>> If the port number is not specified, 80 is always assumed for HTTP.
> Then in July 1992 was published RFC 1340 that obsoletes RFC 1060 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1340) where appears:
finger 79/tcp Finger
finger 79/udp Finger
www 80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP
www 80/udp World Wide Web HTTP
From https://superuser.com/a/996843
So at 1994, 80 is pretty much the default, but sometimes it was specified anyways, just like some addresses you see around still prints/shows http:// / https://. Not everyone know what part of the URI is important or not.
I figured that it was someone's idea to get above the 1024 mark when all they had was a shell account and people weren't using :8080 yet. It could also be that "virtual hosting by name" wasn't a thing yet so a single computer hosting multiple sites had to break it out by port.
I think you’re right that it’s about virtual hosts. AFAICT the Host header first appeared in this 1997 RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2068#section-14.23
I don’t remember why, but many engineering schools, including the one I was attending, used 8080 for department websites. I feel like that was the second most common that I saw.
She mentions that this was all downloaded previously. They prob have a local server/DNS.
Yes and it was 80.
Maybe it's nostalgia, but there's something calming about CRTs...
The amber ones had excellent contrast, unsurpassed IMHO.
As I remember it they were a pain to look at for long periods.
Maybe there was some upside to that though, encouraging people not to stay on the computer for too long...
They're great fun on moving day! Very calming to lug a 50 pound crt up three flights of stairs!
I just imagined the static feeling of touching them with your hand. Damn nostalgic...
Putting the back of your hand close enough to the screen could be a hair-raising experience ...
personal information in professionally produced video before the first minute is out. it's not even the anchor, probably just staff.
It'll never catch on.
I'm also deeply sceptical.
For some reason this made me flashback to the summer of 1981 when MTV first went on the air
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs
Spot the mainframe cabinet and wait for the full wall Moog
(they actually showed non-stop videos back then, it was awesome, nothing like it before)
They went like the first two or three years without commercials. Hard to believe now.
Music videos and live performances are about 99% of my YouTube consumption, so it's been a great MTV replacement for me.
Around that time is it the plan to move to iso/osi 7 level. Is there migration to that? Is a chairman of a little known committee called ietf …
That is my memory. There is some sort of gov standardisation towards that. Read some ietf papers in u and very confused by that direction.
The answer is no. We were not ready for the internet. Its made people crazy.
All the websites shown probably implemented way better than most modern ones?
Definitely simpler. You could just "View source" and understand everything.
well, 28 years after airing of this report, most UK & EU internet services are now provided by a few American companies. for other smaller countries in Asia and Africa, things are probably worse, they are pretty much denied for their digital sovereignty with all essential online services, privacy data and sometimes the infrastructure itself completely controlled by those few companies.
Which companies? Unless you mean websites and not the ISPs themselves, in which case, fair.