When history is written, what year....

[Ichinisan]

The first significant "boom" I remember is when AOL introduced an unlimited plan and it took them more than a year to upgrade their systems with enough phone lines to handle demand. You could spend an hour trying to get a line that wasn't busy. Once you got on, you wanted to occupy that line and not let go...which made things worse for everyone else.

I ditched AOL in '97 and wished I had never touched the horrible shitware.

 

[MikeMike]

depends what country you are in... I am sure in China, the web will have never existed until the great red firewall was created.

 

[TallBill]

I wasn't even born at that time, but the Tandy 2000 I had with the modem still worked on many dial-up message boards in early 1997. I also had a huge phone bill.

Weren't MUDS around back then too?

Ugh, first month that I had dialup (when I was 16 and paid out of my own pocket) we didn't have unlimted local and I got nailed with a $250 phone bill. That's like a month of work for a 16 year old back then. Oops!?!

 

[HeXen]

i thought the interent sucked and was for basement nerds pre late 90's. But no doubt it definitely has changed society and continues to do so. The internet is almost a seperate, single conscientious
its almost like were heading from individual neurons into communicating as a larger brain...if that makes sense which probably doesnt.

the real question is..what is the evolution? were already constantly connected with cell phones, whats next? brain implants where we just think Google and bring up the page in our minds? lol

 

[guyver01]

The term "internet" was adopted in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol (RFC 675: Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974) as an abbreviation of the term internetworking.

 

[ProfJohn]

1995 or 1996 most likely.

That was when AOL really took off along with some of the other services.
For many people AOL was their first experience with the internet even if they were really just on AOL computers and not the WWW.

 

[eldorado99]

So, they have the internet on computers now?

 

[CZroe]

It was when AOL added a web browser and unlimited hours that it really took off with appeal for everyday Joes. That was around 1995/1996.

 

[lxskllr]

the real question is..what is the evolution? were already constantly connected with cell phones, whats next? brain implants where we just think Google and bring up the page in our minds? lol

I think the evolution will be net access that's as common as air. Where no matter your location, you can connect to the web. Gadgets and services will evolve and mature as that happens.

 

[CZroe]

Youtube
Netflix
Twitter
Facebook

:\

Bittorrent
Steam
Online gaming*
Broadband for the masses
Mapping services

*Sure, it existed before, but the vast majority of users in the late '90s were on AOL and couldn't play IPX/SPX or TCP/UDP online games without some kind of crappy tunnel service (like Kali).

 

[SMOGZINN]

Note the topic of this thread. My point is that the release of Mosaic was the beginning of what most people think of as the internet. Of course there has been innovation in the past ten years but it has been evolutionary development, not revolution.

No, Mosaic was the turning point for the World Wide Web, which is a part of the internet. May of us used the internet for a lot of things long before the WWW became useful or popular. Before Mosaic I was useing Lynx to access HyperText documents.

It was when AOL added a web browser and unlimited hours that it really took off with appeal for everyday Joes. That was around 1995/1996.

What you are talking about is the Eternal September when the internet was forever lost to the unwashed masses, and was September 1993. That was not the start of the internet, it was the death of the a dream of what the internet could be.

 

[CZroe]

No, Mosaic was the turning point for the World Wide Web, which is a part of the internet. May of us used the internet for a lot of things long before the WWW became useful or popular. Before Mosaic I was useing Lynx to access HyperText documents.



What you are talking about is the Eternal September when the internet was forever lost to the unwashed masses, and was September 1993. That was not the start of the internet, it was the death of the a dream of what the internet could be.

AOL 2.X had a web browser, but it wasn't until AOL95 that Winsock support arrived so you could use a real browser. Indeed, that's what Weird Al was complaining about... "And postin' 'me too' like some brain-dead AOLer."

To filter the unwashed masses, Anandtech didn't allow AOL or free email registrations for the longest time. AOLers pretty much couldn't sign up.

 

[guyver01]

To filter the unwashed masses, Anandtech didn't allow AOL or free email registrations for the longest time. AOLers pretty much couldn't sign up.

It was because AOL used a rotating DHCP IP Pool, and you couldn't IP ban a member from trolling/posting, because as soon as he logged off, the IP went back into the pool. So it was an "all or none" decision.

 

[Ichinisan]

It was because AOL used a rotating DHCP IP Pool, and you couldn't IP ban a member from trolling/posting, because as soon as he logged off, the IP went back into the pool. So it was an "all or none" decision.

Wasn't that the way pretty-much all dial-up ISPs behaved?

 

[feralkid]

What's this internet you speak of?

Probably can't get it under your bridge.