Click on todays podcast for a sample of what we were listening to at the dawn of the netFor my part, here's a random list of things that it changed for me.
1. I was on it early, back in 1995 not too long after it started to really take off. I was using Netscape version 1 back then with a high powered 7.5kpp modem... oh, heady times. Just being able to get connected was so fraught (remember Trumpet Winsock, or Shiva?) that it was an end in itself. It meant I became a defacto "internet expert" at my place of work. This was equivalent to being deemed a "space technolgy" expert if one had seen Star Wars more than once. Still, it did alter my career trajectory...
"The Internet is the CB radio of the '90's.' It's going to be dead in less than five years. There's no question about it."
Robert Berthiaume, president of film-processor vendor (and now, hilariously, out of existence) Camelot Graphics
2. Email. Remember when Email meant (for Australians at least) quality white goods from Westinghouse? How did we keep in touch before it? Goofing off and talking, that's right. Now we do it at our desks as well. It was great fun while it lasted! We used to actually subscribe to have mail sent to us! Now we'd give anything to stop it from coming in.
3. Banking and bill paying. Two steps forward, one step back. Being able to do anything short of having cash appear from the floppy disk slot at any hour of the day or night. It made life suddenly easier, saved the banks and companies a fortune processing and we were all happy campers. Until of course they decided that they wanted us to pay them for the privelige of saving them on admin costs. Bastards.
4. News. I first came to Norway for Christmas in 1990. The first Gulf War was still on the horizon, CNN was still a struggling news channel and the only source of English language news I could get was from UK newspapers, normally a day or two out of date or from the American Armed Forces Radio. The shortwave radio I had was never quite up to the job of picking up Radio Australia on a regular basis, but I could get by with BBC World Service. Now look at it! I could just as easily be sitting in Nuetral Bay as Tønsberg to stay just as up to date as anyone else. Still feels very, very strange to be able to do that.
5. Television. A more recent development is TV on demand. It 'aint exactly legal yet, but I have seen the future, brothers and sisters! I noticed this a while ago when I realised how infrequently we were watching regular cable TV (and that used to be the ants pants). Hard to go back to programming of other people when we are used to saying "How about a couple of episodes of House tonight?" Praise be and pass the bittorrent client!
