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"The Internet was originally called the 'World Wide Web (WWW)' or 'Information Superhighway' in mainstream media when it first gained popularity, back in the mid-1990s," Jason Eckert tells Bored Panda. "It coincided with the massive rise of PCs in homes and businesses (both small and large) that previously never did much with computers."
Eckert says that the mid-1990s were a very optimistic time for technology in general. "We had two technology booms: the massive rise of PCs in homes and businesses for the first time, and the ability to connect them to the 'Information Superhighway,' a.k.a. the Internet."
The expert gave us a quick rundown of how the early internet worked. "People bought access to this Information Superhighway from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) so that they could use their PCs to browse the worldwide collection of information on other computers connected to the network."
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"This information consisted of webpages with crude graphics and layouts by today's standards but was incredibly new and impressive at the time. The computers that served these webpages were called web servers, and the worldwide collection of web servers was called the 'World Wide Web' (www) or 'Web' for short."
Eckert notes that mainstream media, sitcoms, and movies glorified computers and the Internet whenever they could, and he mentions the cult classic Hackers (1995) as an example. "Everyone knew that computers and the Internet were the future," he says. "Pundits and regular folk regularly speculated on what the Web would evolve into – including David Bowie."
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Perhaps one of the biggest concerns of the modern Internet is data privacy (the recent Metaverse worldwide outage, for example). But what was it like back then, when the Internet was still in its infancy? Were there any such concerns or debates back then?
Eckert says yes: "Privacy concerns have been paramount since the 1960s, and the Internet added fuel to those fires, so to say. People talked about how governments and law enforcement had a new tool to abuse individual privacy and how telemarketers would migrate to using email and ads."
"And these concerns were even more so with those of us who worked in the tech industry. In 1999, Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy told reporters: 'You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.'" I wonder, how would that go down nowadays, especially if we heard it from Mark Zuckerberg's lips?
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For those who don't recall or are simply too young to remember, let's go through a couple of old Internet things. Dial-up internet, for example. Gen Xers seem to be so nostalgic about the modem sound. But how did it all work?
Long gone are the days when you needed a telephone line to have internet access at your home. Back in the '90s, you had to dial a specific phone number given by your internet service provider and establish a connection through a modem.
The computer then used the modem to convert digital data into analog signals that could be transmitted through a telephone line. The analog signals then went through the internet provider's equipment, which converted them back into digital data and connected the user to the internet.
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Google also wasn't always the default search engine. What we today know as Ask.com was one Ask Jeeves. Reginald Jeeves was a fictional butler from P.G. Wodehouse's comics who would answer etiquette questions from his employer, gentleman Bertie Wooster.
This predecessor to Google, Alexa, and Siri is the brainchild of American venture capitalist Garrett Gruener. He came up with the idea of a virtual concierge in 1992 and launched Ask Jeeves in 1997. People asked Jeeves all kinds of questions, from how to get rid of skunk smell to where one can find the best hotel.
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Although other search engines like Yahoo! and Alta Vista were already popular, Ask Jeeves stood out with its quirky butler character. Why did people stop asking Jeeves? When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, advertisers fled from web development. The company reportedly lost $425 million, and in the coming years, Jeeves morphed into Ask.com.
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