30 years ago, one decision altered the course of our connected world

I hear it used to take forever just to download a single nood.

 

That was what text based pron was for.

 

Like so much of our major technology the internet has been a mixed blessing. The spread of knowledge has greatly benefitted humanity but it also has divided us and shackled us to our work in ways that we didn’t anticipate.

foe a personal example I will probably head back to Asia this summer because of family issues. This is a bad time because I have a several projects that I am either heading or critical for. Because the architectural
Models and files we use are cloud based I can still work on even if the project is in North Dakota and I’m in Singapore. At the same
Time it means I’m never away from my job and can’t take a true vacation.

In the 1960’s during the Golden Age of Science Fictions writers like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov wrote that instantaneous global communication would unite humanity and usher in greater understanding and rational thought. We would be one global humanity. Why they didn’t understand is that humans are tribal, suspicious and greedy by nature and just being able to talk to anyone also means you’re just as likely to argue with them than agree with them. Also information itself is neutral so the tools to spread science can also be used to spread propaganda and scams.

 

We can also blame B-Bob for making instantaneous communication portable.

 

I can still remember those swimsuit babe pics coming up line by line when downloading from a local kid's BBS over dialup. LOL

 

Meow!!!

 

YTMND

 

i can’t imagine the dark ages before the internets. how did my parents even live?

 

Like receiving a signal from Voyager. LOL.

 

Clutchfans (not the bbs) was one of the first sites I found while in the computer lab between classes in college. Pretty sure I found it using Infoseek.

Then I got an AOL disc in the mail and life would never be the same.

"WELCOME!"

 

I will always remember the dial-up noise. It was actually somewhat similar to the noise it would make when I was trying to load a program from an audio cassette tape into my first computer (Sinclair ZX Spectrum).

My wife met Tim Berners-Lee and chatted with him. Unfortunately, he has Parkinson's.

 

It was clutchcity.com then, around 1996. Being a rabid Rockets fan, this site was one of the first things I discovered with the internet. Still here pretty much daily after all that time.

 

AI gonna kill us all though. it was a good run.

 

I'm not sure the WWW is what blew everything open or if the PC did. Maybe a combination of both. Most people didn't have a PC before then because they were too expensive and nobody really had a use for them, I guess. The Internet itself was already around for years by the time the WWW came around. I had a friend at UH who used to chat with his girlfriend in Ithaca, NY via terminal and the Internet. A lot of us used to run and/or post on BBS'es that got Internet Usenet newsgroup feeds where we could go to Usenet forums and post about whatever topics just like Reddit. This was made possible by store-and-forward networks like FidoNet that BBSes operated "on". We could send email through this network using NetMail, we could do file requests through FREQing (File REQuest).

I remember the first place I used to talk about Rockets, Oilers, etc. were on sports forums on BBSes in the 1980's and early 90's long before the WWW. alt.sports.basketball.nba.hou-rockets! That's where I found out about ClutchFans.

It was like the WWW was the evolution of all this and put a pretty face on all the old stuff, made it easier to navigate, etc. Now you had moms, dads, and grandpa involved where this type of communication used to be the realm of university students, geeks, etc.

 

Kathy Ireland or Cindy Crawford...

 

or Rachel Hunter or Elle McPherson...

 

Nikki Taylor or Tyra Banks...

 

Nikki Dial