Katie Couric: "Allison, can you explain what 'Internet' is?"

[jAZ]

[SLAG]

I was using a epson 286 with a Monochrome screen and a 2400bps modem...

I would dial into aol using 1.0 - but that got expensive

I did the bbs thing with procomm .. and other comm programs...

then i got a local dial up isp and then i would download stuff.. I would telnet in to their server and use lynx to download files to my area of server space then xfer it from their server to my home pc in only one hop .... there full getting a full speed ( i think i upgraded to 14.4 at that time)


I remember begging for a better modem for my birthday ( i eventually moved up to a 486sx packard bell - then eventually put a pentium overdrive in it. and 8MB RAM (big baller shot caller) )

I was so excited when i got my 33.6 modem that could be freely upgraded to the v.90 standard when It was ready... USRobotics FTW

/stroll down geek memory lane

[listopencil]

I had e-mail at work in '95, maybe '94.

[MITCH]

Originally Posted by SLAG

I was using a epson 286 with a Monochrome screen and a 2400bps mode

I remember begging for a better modem for my birthday ( i eventually moved up to a 486sx packard bell - then eventually put a pentium overdrive in it. and 8MB RAM (big baller shot caller) )
/stroll down geek memory lane

I remember first Packard Bell 486 sx which I paid on credit card for some $2000.00 Thing worked great with Window 3.11 but took me years to pay that thing off being right out of college. That was a boatload of money back in the day.

[alnorth]

Watched the video, and that was just adorable.

I was in high school back then, and my family was a very early adopter, about 1994 or so I think. I can just still vaguely remember as a kid when we first got online and I began to realize what this "internet" was. It was so exciting, and I was lucky in that my whole family really got into it hard-core, my mom was interested, dad was fascinated, for a couple years or so it was just this wonderous discovery.

Now we're all cynical pros who take it for granted and we'd feel like our right arm was cut off if we lost access for a week or so, but I'd love to just go back in time for a few days and feel that sense of wonder again.

[googlegoogle]

Originally Posted by cdcox

In the late 1970's I used one of these (it is a modem) at work to access credit reports. I doubt those were delivered over the internet.




In 1991 I had this at work:

famous hayes modem.

[BigMeatballDave]

Originally Posted by cdcox

In the late 1970's I used one of these (it is a modem) at work to access credit reports. I doubt those were delivered over the internet.

I remember Matthew Broderick using one of these in Wargames.

[Baby Lee]

I vividly recall, spring of 1994, had to go to the Student Union to Telnet chat with people on a text only terminal. Fall of 1994, searching Westlaw in a browser from my desktop. By the fall of 1996, our new law school had ethernet connections at every desk for laptops.

[chiefzilla1501]

[Frazod]

Originally Posted by BCD

I remember Matthew Broderick using one of these in Wargames.

Wyatt had one in Weird Science, too.

[cdcox]

I had a couple more sea-chnage technology moments. In early 1980 I was using 80-column IBM card to run my Fortran programs. You had to type the cards on the key-punch (no typos allowed!), read your deck through the card reader, and then wait for 10 minutes to half an hour for the tech to put the greenbar print out for you to pick up. Then you could see your errors, debug, retype the offending cards, rinse and repeat. By 1981 we got to go into this nice room, with CMS terminals. The were similar to early PCs, except you were interacting with the mainframe. Very nice in comparison.

About the same time Dad brought home one of the very early IBM PCs (he worked for IBM). Little did we know that the little devil sitting on the desk would effectively end his career at IBM a few years later (he sold mainframes and took early retirement). Any way the funny thing was that he showed me this program called Visicalc that he thought was the greatest thing, because it could sum down columns and across columns. And you could do other math in the cells. Little did I know I was looking at the first spreadsheet program that I would use on an everyday basis. I told him "This is no big deal. I can do all of that in Fortran already."

[KChiefs1]

NBC supposedly fired the person who leaked this video.

[acesn8s]

Originally Posted by KChiefs1

NBC supposedly fired the person who leaked this video.

What assholes

[Tribal Warfare]

Originally Posted by KChiefs1

NBC supposedly fired the person who leaked this video.

leaked? The footage was shown to the public 16 years ago. This could lead to a major law suit IMO.

[KChiefs1]

Originally Posted by Tribal Warfare

leaked? The footage was shown to the public 16 years ago. This could lead to a major law suit IMO.

Had to make sure so I looked it up....

http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/02/04..._lnk3%7C199306

By now you’ve probably seen the Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pondering the wonders of the Internet. It’s a bit hokey and of course shows the NBC hosts talking nonsense about something outside of their expertise. Well, NBC clearly didn’t find it as cute as everyone else and reportedly fired the employee that uploaded it. Best Buy almost did that once. Remember how that turned out?

NBC went and pulled most of the videos from the Internet. The video we embedded is dead. But of course they couldn’t get them all. Simply searching Google for Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pulls dozens of copies. Nothing ever goes away online. NBC should know this by now. It’s called the Internet.

Seriously, NBC. No one was laughing at your then-star hosts. We were all laughing with them. It’s not like they were asking questions about the Internet now. This was 1994. No one outside of universities and X-Files watchers had any clue about the Internet. The video simply served as a nice reminder that the Internet grew in importance so rapidly that even some of the world’s most versed newscasters were simply clueless in the early days.

So in case you missed it the first time around, I embedded two different versions of the video below. You know, just in case NBC’s still on a witch hunt and pulls one of them. I reached out to NBC but have yet to hear anything.

That darn @ symbol is so tricky sometimes.