So, the government can't do anything good, but Al Gore, and the funding he obtained, was crucially important in kick starting the Internet? Do you see a little inconsistency in that argument?
Al Gore did a lot to make the internet available to more people. But it was a growing thing. He didn't create it.
Like many Unix features, UUCP was a discount version of this communication scheme. It also had support for offline message queueing and forwarding, which made it perfect for organizations without the cash to connect directly to the ARPAnet/Internet. The "bang paths" were required because messages could be sent to sites without a permanent Internet connection, but that were reachable via dial-up UUCP connections.
But right around that time was when the Internet spread like wildfire! Suddenly if you had AOL, you could access the Internet, same with Compuserve ... then soon after that, the phone company was selling internet connections and there was a fast push to get modems working as fast as possible which brought about the 56k modern into the affordable price range ... then Europe brought ISDN which had wider adoption out there than it did here because we went to DSL pretty quickly ... then once cable modems came into their own and the telcos invested heavily into citywide fiber networks ... we now all have the blazing speeds that we have.
Technically there was no Internet in 1989. We have the Internet today because Al Gore introduced legislation into Congress around 1992 I believe. The bill was called "The Information Super Highway Act" - I remember because when I heard my electronics instructor talking about it in class one day, I actually wrote Al Gores office asking about it, because it was always a fantasy of mine to interconnect computers at high speeds. They actually sent me a copy of the bill with a nice letter thanking me for being interested in it. The bill was HUGE ... hundreds of pages ... mostly legalese, but the summary at the beginning I remember some of ... the argument that Al Gore used to justify getting the money to create this new Information Super Highway was something along the lines of "As we did after world war II when we beefed up infrastructure such as building more highways, etc. so that we could more effectively move around the country, we need to once again invest in the "Information Super Highway" so that people can efficiently gain access to information that they now cannot access at all because there is no existing means from which to do so.
Now, I can't say, because I don't know, exactly HOW our government brought that into existence, or what that money was actually spent on because the Internet was simply an extension of ARPANET and other networks that only government buildings and higher education facilities had access to. And it seems that the gatekeepers of the newly formed Internet belonged to the telephone companies. So it seems to me that the bill, once it got funded, merely subsidized the cost of bringing all of those existing networks onto a backbone and that each major telco was given a tax-funded point of access to that network. And I'm sure ONE of the big telco companies retained ownership of that backbone or maybe it was divided up amongst them I'm not sure.
My first exposure to high-speed Internet was in the early / mid-'90s when I worked as a tech at Edwards AFB in California and some of their computers still had text-based web browsers - Mozilla I believe - And Netscape was the only graphical browser and it ran on Windows 3.11. But right around that time was when the Internet spread like wildfire! Suddenly if you had AOL, you could access the Internet, same with Compuserve ... then soon after that, the phone company was selling internet connections and there was a fast push to get modems working as fast as possible which brought about the 56k modern into the affordable price range ... then Europe brought ISDN which had wider adoption out there than it did here because we went to DSL pretty quickly ... then once cable modems came into their own and the telcos invested heavily into citywide fiber networks ... we now all have the blazing speeds that we have.
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Oh bless your heart, you really are clueless aren't you.
Don't be a smart ass ... I was THERE ... I REMEMBER what happened ... how old are you anyways? And don't you know it's bad form to accuse someone of being wrong without actually demonstrating how they are wrong and being very specific about it? You must be a liberal cause they tend to think that just telling someone that they're wrong makes them wrong ... but life doesn't work that way because facts and evidence actually define reality. So go find your facts and evidence then come back and tell everyone how I'm wrong.
If anyone is curious about technology and its history ... look for a documentary called something like, "The history of international fiber optics" or something to that effect. It was a documentary made a few years ago I believe and it talks about - in some nice detail, our first efforts to lay wire across the ocean back when the telegraph was invented. The engineering challenges that went with doing that ... and how after the first connection was made between New York and London, I think it failed within the first week and they discovered a flaw in their methods of running it in the ocean as well as flaws in the outer layers in the cable. So they had to start over from scratch and run a brand new cable half way around the world, which was a success .. and the cost to the consumer for sending a message or making a phone call to London back in the pre-1920s was close to $5 or $6 dollars per message/phone call which would be about $150 in today's dollars.
It's pretty fascinating stuff.
And man I'm starting to sound like a geek version of Cliff Claven over here ... if anyone remembers the guy who played the postal worker on the show "Cheers" ... lol
All I know is that 56k modems had an engineering issue that needed to be solved before they could produce them for the public ... something about maxing out the capabilities of an analog phone line and some issues that introduced into the hardware that had to be solved, because we had 28.8 modems available for a few years before 56k finally came out.
Don't be a smart ass ... I was THERE ... I REMEMBER what happened ... how old are you anyways? And don't you know it's bad form to accuse someone of being wrong without actually demonstrating how they are wrong and being very specific about it? You must be a liberal cause they tend to think that just telling someone that they're wrong makes them wrong ... but life doesn't work that way because facts and evidence actually define reality. So go find your facts and evidence then come back and tell everyone how I'm wrong.
Anyway back on topic, included is a nice picture of the first web server from my photo library. Now at the science museum here. From CERN:
Yes and good reference
EasyGoing1: slinging insults, particularly political oriented one, after a retraction of a completely cocked up initial entry to this thread is not appreciated on the Internet. It bites. You’d know that if you’ve been on Usenet and the Internet as long as a lot of people commenting.
Anyway I don’t think I’ve seen a single post relating to the OSI model being referenced which is probably the most complete definition of internetworking.
They were great for keeping the birds off my tomatoes
I'm sure you old skool users remember a time when every computer magazine came with a CD for AOL? I certainly collected a few as 'coasters'. No doubt there's a million AOL CDs in landfill awaiting archeological discovery.
In the early 90s, those CDs were often floppy discs for Compuserve services. Today we forget the name Compuserve, but established in 1969, CS helped pave the way for the internet revolution. Any CS users here? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
And wrong again, modems were already cheap LONG before the Internet took off in the public and long before we could ever purchase an Internet connection. Compuserve and AOL were already well-established services and they often gave modems away at computer shows and what have you just to get people to use their service.
And wrong again, modems were already cheap LONG before the Internet took off in the public and long before we could ever purchase an Internet connection. Compuserve and AOL were already well-established services and they often gave modems away at computer shows and what have you just to get people to use their service.
What was NOT popular before the Internet boom happened was 56k modems ... and they didn't start showing up on the shelves of computer stores and other department stores until the Internet boom started ... booming. And it might actually be that one had no effect on the other where it's probably very likely that 56k modems would have exploded out into the retail market when they did regardless of the onset of the Internet. All I know is that 56k modems had an engineering issue that needed to be solved before they could produce them for the public ... something about maxing out the capabilities of an analog phone line and some issues that introduced into the hardware that had to be solved, because we had 28.8 modems available for a few years before 56k finally came out. But even they were short lived once DSL hit the scene.