The Internet and its development over 30 years
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It has been 30 years since I got internet at home. In those days, few people showed what the internet was. Most people didn’t understand what I meant by that. E-mail they laughed off, a few years later many people had internet at home. Today, the internet is our most important channel for information and communication. I think back a bit and look at the development over these 30 years.
The Internet’s childhood
The early 1990s is what we call the internet’s infancy. Users of the internet at the time were mostly universities, research communities and geeks (such as myself). The connection to the internet at the time was via normal telephone lines. We paid for use, in line with using a telephone back then. For the record, using the phone was expensive. We paid per minute. The phone bills were very high.
The thought among nerds back then was idealistic. We were supposed to give according to our ability and share things. For example, programs that were created. A computer program is often called an APP today. We got access to a number of more or less useful programs. Everything from e-mail programs, address books to games. Tetris and snake were two of the games I remember from those times.
This was before the time of social media. Therefore, creating your own website was very popular. A website that often contained a guest book so that those who visited could write a little and like to brag about the website. But what really distinguished the internet 30 years ago from today?
WWW and html
We surfed the internet. Everyone called it surfing. The reason was that the search engines were poor and often limited to national searches. In Norway, the search engine was called Kvasir. Mostly we visited one website or another, jumped to the next one via links. This is what surfing was all about.
The websites were programmed in html. Java and Javascript were often used to refresh the page with slightly more advanced functions. We created an html page using e.g. notepad. All codes were entered manually. Programs (Apps today) that could create such pages did not exist or were very poor.
I created my very first website in 1995. One of my family was moving abroad. He was as much a computer geek as I was. When he left, he asked if I could create a web page so that he could follow what was happening here. There were few newspapers on the internet and they were poorly updated at the time. Yes, I promised it even though I knew zero about it. So I spent some time looking at recipes on the internet, how to make a website. The very first one was just text, then I learned how to insert images and other features. Pretty soon the site became very advanced by the standards of the time.
After social media took over the internet, the use of private websites has decreased. Today, it is newspapers, public and voluntary institutions and companies that use web pages the most. Bloggers do it too. What separates a blog from a private website is that a blogger tries to say something that the person thinks is important. A private website basically only told who made the page, a little about interests and family. That is, the same as a Facebook profile does today.
Newsgroups
Newsgroups are something that is almost completely gone today. A newsgroup is a forum for discussion where we had to activate ourselves. There were thousands of such groups. Everything possible was discussed. Everything from serious discussions about politics, sport and science to more or less discussions about just nonsense. I was a member of several groups. In one of these we discussed the pros and cons of paving the entire world. We used our own programs to access Newsgroups
After Facebook and other social media saw the light of day, much of the discussion moved away from the newsgroups and onto social media. Today, newsgroups are little used.
FTP
File Transfere Protocol (FTP) is perhaps something that many people do not know what it is. But it is simply explained to transfer files from your own PC to a server on the internet. To create websites, we have to upload the files to the internet, then FTP is used now as then. But the way we found programs back then was also via FTP. Files that were available for everyone to download were there. That’s how we initially downloaded more or less useful files and programs.
Digital photography also became available at the turn of the century. First with digital photography devices, then on phones. This made the transfer of images to the internet easier.
Email was a big revolution of course. Being able to communicate with others quickly over long distances made communication easier. The problem was, of course, that few actually had email at the start. But gradually the number increased.
Today, regrettably, email is something that has been exploited for commercial junk, etc. The amount of advertising that ends up in our email is enormous. There are also the attempts at fraud. Email today is being choked by advertising and fraud. It’s a shame, email should have been a simple and fast form of written communication.
Eventually, websites appeared with links to pages that we could download. Browsers had also improved and accepted the desalting of files. Pretty soon, the internet became the most common way for us to download files. FTP is still very important for us who create web pages.
Internet, telephone, radio and TV
In the Internet’s infancy, watching movies over the Internet was impossible. Even pictures were difficult and when pictures became more common, it took a long time to download even a picture in the browser. Being able to watch entire films seemed an impossibility for many at the time. But around the turn of the century we saw a development.
I have always been interested in technology and development and said at the time that “in a few years the internet, radio and television will have merged”. By that I meant that we don’t actually think about which platform we are actually on. Today, most people may not think that when we watch a movie that we stream, we are actually using the internet. Internet even if it is our TV that we stream the film on. Our own smart phone that we carry everywhere is an example of different media that have merged.
News
Getting news when it happens is perhaps what has changed our everyday life the most in the technological field. OK, we used to have radio and TV. But the way the internet captures news today is absolutely amazing compared to 30 years ago. The first time I can say I actually read a big news story on the internet when it happened was when Diana was killed. Minutes after the accident, I read it online.
In a world with an extremely large number of more or less serious news providers, there is also fertile ground for both fake news and outright propaganda. Especially in 2014 during the Maidan uprising in Ukraine and since Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the occupation of eastern areas of Ukraine, Russia was very active with both propaganda and fake news. The Russian online roles appeared in large numbers. At that time I exposed several Russian trolls. They were active in discussions on the internet, allegedly with Norwegian names. How did I reveal them? Yes, they were often friends with each other on Facebook. Often they had slightly strange Norwegian names, I checked in Norwegian public registers, there was no one with these names. Sometimes the attempt to write Norwegian was also so bad that they revealed themselves.
Came to stay
There were many predictions about the death of the internet 20-30 years ago. A daily phenomenon, or a matter of fashion, some said. Those of us who followed showed that the development could not be stopped. The Internet was here to stay. Today, the internet is so much more than it was 30 years ago.
I read some time ago that those growing up now are far more critical of the information they get on the internet. They are better at checking sources. It is the generation that has grown up in our digital age. Those who are older have grown up in a time where the information given has already been checked. Newspapers, TV, Radio etc checked this for us before we got it. Today we have to be better at checking ourselves and not least checking sources.
But the death of the internet is greatly exaggerated. The Internet lives on and will do so for a long time. Development cannot be stopped.
Sources:
Bulletin-board system | computer science | Britannica