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.
Two years earlier, he dismissed it as "just a tool like a typewriter": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmxOq9STmQM, so it's interesting how he evolved. He does already say that he liked immediate feedback from comments about the show the night before, so the point about the audience was already there.
This is consistent with Bowie's genius to be more an early adopter type than a visionary type. A hell of an early adopter.
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.
I sort of arrived at this as well in my comment above. This is mainstream media with a more outsider take vs insiders actually building stuff on the internet. I still don’t think anyone really had the vision of everything today.
> 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.
I was going to say this as well. Even pre internet my first inclination from dialing BBS was how do I make one of these? How can I get a dedicated phone line in my bedroom? From there, chatting with people who called my board, then moving to IRC which was all UGC. Bots, scripts, file hosts etc. distributed servers.
I think my take away is more that these large “visions” of what the internet could be were made by outsiders from an outside vantage point. They had difference answers to the question of what the internet could be. The insiders were too busy playing around on it to think about answering that question.
> Early internet had little to none of that world order. Those corporations are slow to act and tend to be last to the party.
Those corporations dominated the Internet. It was NYT et al who was doing the publishing and the users doing the reading. Large, incumbent corporations dominated online sales.
That they were slow to react to the changes and therefore the user-driven Internet eventually took over from them for that reason do not change the fact that the early Internet was literally a one-way street.
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.
"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."
I would say that describes the online world now, not at the internets adoption in 1990s.
No, today small business run ecommerce, user-generated content dominate large swath of the Internet. Even what Amazon does is providing a venue for small or medium businesses to sell.
> 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.
I think this is a fair statement for the world wide web (although there were pretty notable standouts, particularly in the very late 90s), but every other protocol was far more democratized with very little corporate influence, and those protocols were far more relevant in 1994 than they are now.
Exactly the opposite of this happened. Almost all content on the early-mid 90s web was user-generated. The bulk of it was personal "homepages" with low production values describing hobbies or technical interests.
Very few large corporations had even heard of this crazy new "Internet" thing in the 90s, and even fewer cared. Almost none had a corporate webpage even listing their address and phone number, much less produced any content at all.
Many had the .com domain name corresponding to their corporate brand registered by domain squatters they later had to buy it from. Some didn't even notice for years.
> Exactly the opposite of this happened. Almost all content on the early-mid 90s web was user-generated
I guess its because I combined content creation + publication under the title 'content that people are misunderstanding.
Large companies created the content, they published it, they dominated the views. The user generated content being seen by a few hundred people a month in a forum or a personal homepage on the fringes of the Internet did not make any dent in their monopoly at the time.
The PLATO system had online user feedback in the 70s, and users were able to add content, including making their own lessons and games. Helps that it was an educational system, running on connected networks at different universities.
This is might just be me misremembering things, but I have a vague memory that, when the "internet trend" was starting to feel less like a trend, and more something that had some staying power, people had a concern of looking ridiculous in the same way they had a generation before, during the nuclear age. "People will be driving nuclear powered cars on the moon!" etc.
Mix in the fact that there was a trend of children making headlines for breaking into various high-tech or secretive areas, and it seemed more like something that didn't have much cause to be respected.
Vernor Vinge saw it coming too. In his 1992 sci-fi novel “A Fire Upon the Deep,” set in the far future, the internet is called “The Net of a Million Lies”:
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.
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...",
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 :-)
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.
He did write a sequel of sorts to Generation X called Generation A in 2009. I haven't read it so I can't comment on it, though I suspect it is already 'of it's time' in the way that, say, Microserfs is. It's a fun novel to be sure, for something that emanates a huge "now-ness circa 1994" it's still very enjoyable today, but maybe that's because I can vaguely remember life back then. I'd wonder what a younger reader might think about it?
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.
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.
It got its current name 2013. It was a merger 1998 of "Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building" and the one responsible for transport. The urban development department was responsible for internet infrastructure not the transport one.
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.
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.
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?
The only reason this isn't a thing yet is because consumers don't ask for it and companies don't want heat for making their entertainment "all about the money".
We will definitely see something like that soon, is my bet. Perhaps not "AI" which is able to inspect the scene from a video feed and recognise items for your convenient weekend shopping (say you wanted to purchase the vase used in movie X, or the drapes from tv-show Y). But we're not far off...
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.
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.
Yep just like all apples attempts. If iTunes can’t even leverage its install base (ubiquitous back then) to make Ping a success (remember Ping?! I was one of the dozens of active users) around music or Game Center social features around games then I don’t see why it’d be any different for video.
why would building an entire social network cost a ton of money? it’s an entirely different product - dozens of features and content moderation just to get something simple out there…
Netflix doesn't want to look bad when they see things on your list that are no longer available. I guess they could hide/remove them but then it looks bad to the list creator.
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.
Well, CBS Interactive is a branch of CBS, the broadcaster.
A decade and a half ago, its reach was greater than Netflix's.
My point wasn't the scale of the hosting network but the failure of broadcaster- (or program-originator-) centric "interactive" television concepts. I think the trope existed even when Neil Postman was writing his books ... not sure if this shows up in Amusing Ourselves to Death or Technopoly, or both, though I think it does. They're 1980s / 1990s. Postman died in 2003 though, so if it was him, it was early in Internet time.
Wikipedia lists attempts dating to the 1950s, though these were not networked interactions. Those existed, however, by 1977.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I realize I'm going way against the grain of other commenters, but this video has made me aware of how little progress has actually been made since then. I mean, the core ideas of the modern internet services we're relying on were already there back in 1994.
Aside from much slicker devices, much higher bandwidth, much broader reach and a few new things around the edges, how much change have we actually seen? I'm of course being a bit facetious - speed, convenience, reach are all very important. But when it comes right down to core "mind blowing" new tech, how much have we actually improved on 1994?
Dynamic websites is a core idea of the modern internet and that concept did not exist in 1994 internet. JavaScript did not exist.
Modern internet is also real-time and largely community driven. Even the notion of these did not exist in 1994 internet. Websockets did not exist. Social networks did not exist. Video conferencing did not exist. Collaborative document editing did not exist.
The ideas of wearables and always connected devices (smart watches, speakers, thermostats, lights, etc) did not exist in 1994.
The idea that you could create virtual worlds, ie a metaverse, where anyone and everyone could interact by talking and even manipulating objects in the virtual world did not exist in 1994.
The idea of aggregating user behavior across every connected device they use, site they visit, physical location they visit, and generating a prediction of their likes/dislikes and future behavior in order to tailor the actual user experience to each individual (targeted advertising, your personal google search results, etc) is a mind blowing core idea of the modern internet which did not exist in 1994.
> Dynamic websites is a core idea of the modern internet and that concept did not exist in 1994 internet.
CGI and other forms of dynamicity absolutely existed in 1994[0].
> JavaScript did not exist.
IT just needed 1 more year!
> Modern internet is also real-time and largely community driven. Even the notion of these did not exist in 1994 internet.
Check out MUDs and MOOs. Lambda was 3 years old in 1994. Wired called online virtual worlds "the addiction of the '90s[1]."
> Websockets did not exist.
But Berkeley sockets did (although you might have had to do some tinkering with Winsock on Windows!) , and I'm curious what you can do over a web socket that you can't do over a traditional socket.
> Social networks did not exist.
MUDs and mOOs again.
> Video conferencing did not exist.
Intel actually released a "kit" to enable this on regular Windows PCs in 1994. Cost a pretty penny though[2]!
>Collaborative document editing did not exist.
The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Widely available implementations of the concept took decades to appear. A piece of software called Instant Update was released for the classic Mac OS in 1991 from ON Technology[3].
> The ideas of wearables and always connected devices (smart watches, speakers, thermostats, lights, etc) did not exist in 1994.
Proto wearables absolutely existed in 1994[4].
X10 was developed in 1975 by Pico Electronics of Glenrothes, Scotland, in order to allow remote control of home devices and appliances. It was pretty cool, too, the modules had big honkin relays in them and would go 'clonk' when you switched them!
> The idea that you could create virtual worlds, ie a metaverse, where anyone and everyone could interact by talking and even manipulating objects in the virtual world did not exist in 1994.
Seriously though, check out what LambdaMOO and similar things were[5][6].
> The idea of aggregating user behavior across every connected device they use, site they visit, physical location they visit, and generating a prediction of their likes/dislikes and future behavior in order to tailor the actual user experience to each individual (targeted advertising, your personal google search results, etc) is a mind blowing core idea of the modern internet which did not exist in 1994.
Now this, you're right about. Personally I could 1000% do without.
If you’re going to frame things like that, the internet itself wasn’t revolutionary at all. It was merely combining various decades old technologies, working proof of concepts, and research papers.
Do you also believe smartphones are merely an evolution of the first mobile phone from 1973?
Stuff that had either not been conceived of or required technology that didn't exist at the time. Even then, you can find precursors to all of those things since tech development is path-dependent.
But seriously, dynamic websites and online social communities and the like existed then :)
As for smartphones there's a pretty clear lineage that includes early bag phones, pagers, primitive handhelds, Nokia bricks, The Danger Hiptop/Sidekick, Blackberry, and so on.
Of course there’s a precursor to all technologies. Of course smart phones have a clear lineage. Of course everything in existence has a precursor and lineage.
I stand by everything in my original reply. The modern video conferencing tools, collaboration tools, dynamic websites, etc absolutely could not have been made with 1994 technology. I remember that time period well and there were so many revolutionary technologies and ideas missing.
With all the knowledge you have today, could you go back to 1994 and recreate a Facebook or YouTube, serving 1B+ users with real-time interactivity using CGI and Berkeley sockets? No, that’s just laughably absurd.
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.’
"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.
>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.
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.
ARPANET was basically military and educational, and was pre-web. I remember using a 300 baud acoustic coupler to dial into a university computer c.1980; there really wasn't a whole lot you could do with it back then - just simple text-based stuff like telnet (remote login) and command-line based e-mail (SMTP) as well as FTP. Even things like IRC, Usenet, Archie, Gopher all came later.
While the commercial internet, allowing companies and consumers to connect, grew out of ARPANET, it obviously was commercially funded, with backbones built out by the telecoms, etc. I think for most people today the term "internet" is essentially synonymous with "web" - stuff they can do in their browser, which of course came a lot later. HTML and HTTP were only invented c.1990, and this was the beginning of the internet as people today know it. Even then, a lot of people only saw the internet as filtered through AOL.
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.
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.
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!
I watched this live when it first aired. My Miracom 9600 being my gateway drug to Usenet, Gopher, IRC, and the warez scene I was a part of.
How far we have come. The future will be interesting and exciting, if we can get past this current hump of monolithic "controlled experiences" that Facebook/Meta/Google/Amazon/Twitter/etc want to push on us.
A wag once observed that the purpose of TV programming is to keep you in your chair for the ads. Product placement blurs this line. So commercial-free MTV was all "product" placement, all the time ?
Here 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?"
Something I'd have prefered about URL's is a numbering system instead of superdomains, that would allow allocating different sites at the same domain name. For example:
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
Hahaha, brilliant. As a kid in UK IRC then Napster freed my mind from isolation due to my geekiness. There was one other kid in school into programming then getting online there was whole world.
We didn’t even have free local calls so being able to chat with a F/14/California was mind blowing! Funny how many of them there were…
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.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
That is correct, there was no way to have multiple hosts on the same machine. One of the start-ups I helped build (engineer #2) in early 1997 (which still exists today in some form that many young, single men have spent quality time alone with) had a landing page, so that if your browser did not provide the host header, it would give you an index page of all the salacious sub websites/sub-domains available that you could then click on - it was an image map, naturally. We were very careful to keep the heterosexual and the homosexual offerings on physically separated servers so that customers did not complain about "accidentally" clicking on content that they didn't want to see. Latest versions of Netscape at the time supported the host header, but Internet Explorer very explicitly did not. And IE was the default for many people just getting online for the first time outside of AOL/Compuserve.
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.
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.
