My favorite British newspaper site continues to the Guardian (so should it be favourite?) because they have these much better interactive pieces like this one on the a People’s History of the Internet. You conservatives can click on it safely, this isn’t some thing subjective as per Howard Zinn’s pieces. It’s pretty good for laypeople or those who are purists which my field is filled with. Check it out and watch how the number of hosts grows. Scary to think I was in college when it was under 500,000 hosts.
I remember how much Web browsing was really picking up 15 years ago with my job at University Towers. Receiving/sending e-mail wasn’t very new to me since I did a bit of it at Marquette in my MSCS 050 class (which I despised), GEnie in 1992 (dropped when I got canned from GDW) and AOL; hard to believe I was excited about using them again in 1994 when they changed their terms to (I think) $10/month for five hours. Anyway, the residents were requesting more modems for the Macs and PCs in the lab to use their PPP accounts and something I can’t remember that UT used, I want to say SLIP but I could be incorrect. There wasn’t any Netscape, Firefox, Safari or Explorer, only Spyglass. Things improved for me when I started working at Apple a year later where access was easier and faster via their network; certainly made going home to use dial-up painful.
It’s pretty amazing how quickly Web browsers, RSS Feeds, e-mail, ‘blogs and everything else have quickly become ubiquitous in our lives. I know I feel pretty vulnerable and helpless without my portable for more than day.
And it all started 40 years ago with a mere four hosts on the West Coast.