What the internet used to be like

A CBC report from the mid-90's

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I was at ebaum's world today and I found this old new report from the mid-90's, and I found it very interesting. It reminded me of when I first got online. The thing I first noticed when watching it was they refered to "the internet" as just "internet"... so it sounds sort of weird to my ears.

And then John Allan started talking.... and said this:

There is not a lot of cursing or swearing, there is not a lot of personal cuts, there is not a lot of putdowns that one would expect to find, there's not screen fulls of "Go to Hell", which is surprising. The kind of liberation.... its interesting because you would think that because you're anonymous you'd do anything you want but people in a group have their own sense of community in what we can do.

Man, it wasn't even like that when I got online in 1995... so I don't know what he is talking about. Does anyone remember the above utopic time in the development of the internet where everyone was civil?

Seeing the report made me remember reading a few old issues of the 'net Magazine from 1996, which were predicting the future of the internet, most of which made me laugh because some were dead on, and some were so far off. Predictions such as:

-Shockwave technologies were going to be a passing fancy, but anything Flash-related was going to be so bandwidth intensive that it was going to be of little use outside of cd-rom work. Of course, this was back in the days when a 28.8 modem was cutting edge, and having high-speed internet was something only a few companies could afford.

-Personal homepages would become something everyone had... though most people would just talk about their own lives(blogging perhaps)

-Large Filesharing wouldn't be practical(tell that to Napster/Kazaa)

-The Internet would begin to rival television in serving the entertainment and informational needs of its users.

It truly is interesting to look at the past sometimes.

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