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This article first appeared in the December/January 1996-1997 issue of PL.
Well if finally happened. We got hooked up at home. After some struggle, I got it going, and cruised the Internet last night. My coworkers were starting to tease me. You got a new computer; why aren’t you hooked up to the Internet? When you going to get hooked up to the Internet? There were all these benefits I would get from the Internet, all this software, all this information, all this entertainment. I knew they were right. We had it at work, although it’s balky, and the quality of the hardware and the browser were inferior to what I had just bought for home. What I have at home is a Pentium 133 and the difference is astounding.
The speed is one thing, compared to the 486 at work, but the display is another thing entirely. I have a good monitor at home now with an ultra-fine dot pitch. The color is great and the graphics overall are night and day different from anything I’ve ever seen before. Running Windows 95 you could see some of that to advantage, but only on the intensely graphical Internet does my monitor truly get to shine. Color and graphics are the leading features of the Internet, and the constant shifting of screen displays as you hop from place to place put a strain on underpowered computers that makes them unbearably dull and slow.
It may sound peculiar to say this, but the computer I have on my desk at home right now is the most powerful computer I have ever seen or put my hands on anywhere. That tells you something. I don’t move in very exalted circles of business or industry. We have hundreds of computers where I work, roughly one per person, but we usually don’t get the very latest equipment. To show you how fast things have changed power and price-wise in the past year or so, this thing I’ve got here is more powerful than the local area network servers we have at work, and I paid considerably less for this.
The one I had at home, until recently, was an antique, almost ten years old. If it hadn’t died on me I wouldn’t have my new one now, regardless of how tempted I have been over the years. I could not see replacing my faithful 8088 as long as it still worked, so I watched the 286 come and go, the 386 come and go, and finally the 486 come and go, and, jumping three generations of chip development I now have a 586, but the only reason I’ve got that is because it too has come and is about to go, since the 686s are out there and the price of Pentiums is taking a nose-dive.
Always, I would tell myself, if I waited a little longer, another six months or a year, I would get more for my money. And the same is true right now. I bought my new computer six weeks ago and if I ordered it today I would get more power in several categories and save several hundred dollars to boot. In six more weeks the change will be even more noticeable.
In a market advancing as quickly as personal computers, you will never get ahead of that curve, but you can be assured, that if you break down and finally buy one, today, or this year, you will get an Internet-cruising machine that will give you a few years’ satisfactory service anyway. It’s hard to predict where it all will end, but a good bet would be on ever-increasing graphics power and speed, since American culture has an insatiable hunger for both those things to the point where what we have today will be beggared by what we will have five, ten years from now, and what we will have in fifty or one hundred years is honestly beyond our power to imagine.
A good example of what I’m talking about is the fact that this whole Internet business has come up, to the public attention that is, in one year. Oh it has been developing quietly for years, but it’s only in this past year that the fact of its existence really became something that just about everybody is supposed to know about. The word got out that it’s supposed to be entertaining, something that gives pleasure like television, and that’s all it took. Oh really? Sold.
A year ago the up-and-coming if not leading commercial on-line service, America Online, was notably not providing Internet access to its enormous customer base of two million or so. Eager members, aware of the phenomenon going on around them got nothing but excuses for several months in a row. Everywhere the Internet was promised, it seemed like it showed up about six months later, if you were lucky. Now, one year later, you can get it, direct and uncensored, with a local telephone call and a modest access fee, in every county of the Northern Neck. It has arrived. Once you’ve got the computer, you can have the Internet right here, if your home, for about what you pay for cable TV.
I don’t think I would be risking much if I predicted that over the next few years, TV is really going to take a licking from the internet. Recent studies suggest that people can’t or won’t do both. Once people have Internet at home, and start spending hours on it at a time, something has to go, and that thing usually turns out to be TV. They cut back the hours they watch TV and spend that time on the computer.
What Has Changed
People who come on now will see only the glitzy, graphical side of the Internet. To them, this will be the Internet. They will take it for granted, and in typical American fashion show no interest whatsoever in all the primitive, early halting steps that got it to this wonderful pass we’re at today.
It’s like going into a junk store and seeing an old 1948-model black and white television with an 8” screen, in that peculiar oval shape the early TVs had. Sure, lots of people watched those sets, and were glad to have them, but nobody gives a rip about that now. We watch big color sets now, and anybody who only has a 25” TV feels inadequate and wishes they had a bigger one, just like anybody who only has an antenna wishes they had cable and anybody who only has cable wishes they had a dish. As an amateur historian, I consider myself fortunate, in the brief span of eighteen months or so, to have experienced first hand almost the full gamut of Internet experience, from antiquated to state-of-the-art.
The Internet got its start in the late 1960s when a network was envisioned which would enable a computer in one place to “talk” to a computer in another place regardless of the physical distance between them, and the Internet prototype went on-line at UCLA in 1969. The system slowly spread to other research universities for the purpose of testing and refinement, and it took approximately fifteen years for the number of schools and research labs joined by the network to reach 1,000. Growth today in the so-called “hosts” is measured in the millions per year.
What was the Appeal?
The Internet they used in those early days was definitely plain vanilla, but it served a useful purpose, the chief one of which was the transfer of short electronic messages, called mail, and longer messages, called files. You may wonder what all the hu-ra-ra was about, but I invite you to think back twenty years if you can and consider what we have and use today that we didn’t have then. We had no Federal Express and no UPS; no fax machine, no VCR, no home video camera; no answering machine on our telephone to speak of, and no personal computer at home or at work.
Those things we increasingly take for granted today did not or barely existed then, and so that primitive form of Internet, which basically linked big university computers via telephone lines, seemed like pretty hot stuff. You could send somebody a short message and it didn’t matter whether they were at home to receive it or not. It would stay in their electronic mailbox until they called for it. The same with files. Big, bulky chunks of information could be sent to somebody on the other side of the world at electronic speed, that is to say the speed of light, somewhat faster than the post office would deliver then or today in the form of a printed copy, and a lot cheaper- no postage required. Neither mail nor files cost the user anything to send and receive, which is one of the reasons the Internet eventually spread beyond the big universities. Recent graduates, who had used it while in school, carried the technology out to their workplaces in business and industry. Large banks of stored information called databases were added to the Internet and this aspect of the Internet began to grow rapidly. But despite its increasing appeal it remained somewhat dull in appearance. It looked like you needed to be a computer weenie to really use it, and those who did most often had a very specific, job-related task to perform. The Internet was work, not for pleasure, or entertainment, and there wasn’t much danger that it would be mistaken for fun.
The personal computer changed all that. Once you had one and a device to connect it to a telephone line you could get on the Internet at home and it wouldn’t be much different from the (largely) networked access you were used to at the office. Once enough people had personal computers at home (and work) that could hook up independently, and it took millions of PCs to make this happen, a mass market came into being, and with it all the usual free market incentives.
A bright person (Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman and Oxford graduate) then figured out a way to use the existing Internet to store and transmit and share information in a colorful, highly graphical way that can be fun and does resemble entertainment. That was the World Wide Web, and it’s just enough like a walking, talking color TV that the Web, brought into the privacy of your own home over the Internet, was bound to be a hit.
If TV is cool, in the sense that it invites participation, the Internet is supercool and beats TV at its own game. IT uses a little personal color TV to start with and then adds stereo sound and 10,000 channels- many of them wildly nonconformist and off-color compared to commercial broadcasts or cable. You can jump around to your heart’s content, knowing that you could not exhaust the channels in a lifetime. The Internet is a TV with infinite channels, and instead of one or two channels devoted to your particular interest as you might find on cable, there are hundreds, if not thousands. And you can talk back to every one of them. All traffic on the Internet is two-way.
TV softened us up for the Internet and now the whole country, like a ripe fruit, is poised to drop into the waiting hand of the Internet service provider. Sex was one of the first popular attractions of the Internet, and if you think there is anything, from making money to paying our bills, from voting to going to church, from reading the news to writing letters to the editor, that we won’t be doing on the Internet in a few years, think again.
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