Back in the 90s, you could go into a Borders book store and, if you were so inclined, buy a big book that had nothing but URLs and descriptions in it. For real.
Shinjiro Aragaki search engines were really bad before google especially towards the late 90s when website growth was increasing so much, lots of site spamming was going on that hindered what you were trying to find.
@Michael Earls we also still use the internet (obviously) but I think he means this is all old news not that we don't use any of the technology or protocols mentioned
I am SO grateful for this show, which literally chronicled the advent of computing while it happened. I had no idea this show even existed until15 years after it ended. Now I'm literally watching them all and re-living some somderful memories, as I grew up during this era.
This is GOLD! We can't go back in time and see what people's reactions were to receiving telegraph messages for the first time but we can watch people exploring the Internet in its infancy. So great!
I remember calling in via a slow baud modem and logging in to a bulletin board. I was very intrigued. Then not much later in university in 1994 on a UNIX system seeing the first Netscape webbrowser I was blown away. Though loading the frontpage of let's say an Australian newspaper took forever, I was always the last one to leave the computer room when it closed in the afternoon.
Notice they didn't right out denounce Russia in this episode. This show is obviously a Russian puppet. This show was part of their plan of getting Trump elected in 2016 and will be used as support about how Russia groomed the American public to vote for Trump in 2020, and Tulsi Gabbard in 2024.
@@joepike1972 This is a rather random video to make comments mocking liberals on. Besides, they could just retort that Yeltsin was in power 1993, and that he was the "good" Russian leader (Putin being the "bad" Russian leader.)
I love 5:45 and on when the dude describes a website, before the word was invented or at least popularly used. "It's a point-and-click hypertext interface...a window..."
that's for my dad what the internet is now but since facebook we can drag or right click with the mouse and how about middle click? that was never too widely used tho I bought a new mouse in 1998 for doing that i thought it was cool the first couple times lol. Anywey nice comment baby bird... you seem to have a nice intelligent background I'd wire you to my desktop
@@Luke5100I worked in tech in Silicon Valley starting in 1989. I first heard of the "world wide web" in 1996. I suspect the WWW was not as well-known as you might have thought.
This was a really good consistence and compact show for tech geeks and business owners... and had Gary Kildall a intelligent man of integrity and a TRUE innovator as one of its host. RIP
Also, this show is good for computer buffs and technology fans, like me. I do not get along so well without my microcomputer, which is my powerful typewriter. That is why I call it my "keyboard."
From 1995 to early 2000 everything seemed to advance at such a fast rate. The power of computers not to mention the rapid rise of the internet. The biggest thing I remember from this era was realvideo and mp3 compression, that really revolutionsed what you could do online especially as all of us were still on dialup. We used to watch full screen video on a 56k dial up modem.
@@ens8502When CompUSA, Circuit City and Good Guys were still around, selling overpriced PCs. I remember buying our first family computer at one of those locations for approx $2200. That got you a 166MHz of Pentium processing, or for an additional $700 you upgrade to the "ultra fast" 200MHz lol
@@BarryHolsinger In recent years smartphones have become powerful enough to brute force pretty much any basic task that the average person will use it for. I still use a 3 and a half year old Samsung S20+ 5G. I see no reason to upgrade as it runs everything I need it for at buttery smooth 120hz. The same can be said about the average laptop from the mid 2010s still being powerful enough for the average user.
Wow. 14:01 is essentially an early version of Skype. 17:08 is essentially what we would call a podcast today. It's really crazy looking at the stuff we take for granted today as new and mysterious things back then.
Nah, a podcast also needs a way to subscribe to a bunch of different feeds (via the RSS protocol) that will download a show automatically when it is available. You will have to fastforward to about 2003 for this. What is shown in the clip is just regular streaming where you have to go online and start/stop or download a file manually. And switch to another site for another show and manually do the same there....
There's talk of bringing this show back, but I'd be afraid that the experts Cheifet brings on to walk us through this stuff will be perfectly-presented twentysomethings. I don't want that. I want the weirdy beards. The middle-aged man with the walrus moustache, the grad student in beard and much too large cardigan, guy who looks like Charles Manson's younger brother, homely woman with coke bottle spectacles, and humourless Asian businessman. I want a cadre of socially-awkward, aesthetically-challenged computer geeks, to make the audience of the show feel like maybe, just maybe, everything's gonna be alright.
Wow. I have been a software engineer for over 37 years and of course, have watched all of the "interweb" happen, but I had no idea this show even existed! What a gem it was!
My father was into computers from the amateur flip-switch days, and I ended up programming for the DoD. I watched this show from the very beginning! It's a gas to go back in time to watch. I remember the first time I saw the WWW ... even on a T1 line, most servers were so slow that it seemed like dialup.
@Nob the Knave Ummm, no. The internet is THE global interconnection of ALL networks, lol. Now, how exactly, can you have more than one of something that already addresses everything??? Also, it's kinda CORRECT to apply an article to denote a noun, so that makes it not a really a preference, now doesn't it? Seriously, change your name to Noob the Knave, for accuracy purposes, mmm'k?
@@231mac You are wrong. The world wide web came in '95 this is before that. There were many internets. There was picospan since the 80's and compuserve since the 70's, but no www or HTML
@@hyzercreek Yeah, that's a big nope. The WorldWideWeb (WWW) was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and he wrote the first web browser in 1990. The internet is just that; THE internet. It is the amalgamation of ALL networks. It can't be individualized. You might as well try to individualize open space, lol. Honestly, the concept is so simple that it's embarrassing that one can't comprehend it. The second the first two networks became connected, THE internet was born. Pretty simple...
to be fair, a lot of TV news even at the time was also shallow and unreliable. This was a half-hour TV show, publicly funded on PBS. Public services like NPR and PBS still make pretty high-quality in-depth content, although in recent years they have sadly been gutted from their former glory by more conservative policies.
@@tommyeastwood4393 Well nobody semi-intelligent anyway. Same exact reason why you needed to be intelligent to use the internet in the early to mid 90's.
+Jack Toff Dude, that's hella-cool, but don't forget to double your hard-drive with Stacker (but not before adjusting your drive's interleave ratio to 1:1).
Sweet! I just bought another 440MB Maxtor hard drive for my machine and a buddy of mine that works at Iomega says they will soon be coming out with a floppy drive that is going to a have 100MB floppy, revolutionary!
Damn, NCSA Mosaic get's only a tiny portion of the show and all the command line browsing the majority. Most of the command line stuff died away and Mosaic lived on in the form of modern web browsers....
RdVortex I still use command line for most of things. The thing is these days command line interfaces are used only by professionals; masses moved to facebook
QuantumBraced well you couldn't, far from everyone had acces to internet way back then. in fact you still cant! we take internet for granted but acces to internet is matter of clas and where you happen to be borned.. sad fact that not everyone in the world are born with the same chans.
Where have you been? Cell phone have exploded in the third world because they didn't have land line infrastructure. The third world has a huge advantage because they skipped the lind line phase.
The younger generation don't understand that if you weren't an engineering/IT student, educator or researcher, you didn't have Internet access prior to public commercialization, period. The best that you got was a Compuserve subscription that charged $20/hour to do anything meaningful. That QUICKLY added up and made one nervous just using it because of the tolling bill. That was a lot of money back then if you adjust for inflation especially.
1993 got my first pc with DOS 3.0 on an 8088 model. I had a 2400 baud modem and 2 megabytes of ram. This is nostalgic. Logged in through Telnet on BBS and played Usurper and Tradewars with a monochrome monitor. 2 years later I was working in Tech Support on Windows 3.1 for Compuserve.
This content is absolutely fascinating and mind-blowing. I first started using the internet back in 1994 when I connected to a chat forum in the US from my home in the UK. It was amazing to be able to text live with someone so far away, but it cost my family a lot in phone bills and I got into trouble with my parents. Even today, I am still amazed by the ability to share information so easily and quickly. It excites me that others can read my typing instantly.
Watching this made me feel nostalgic for the early internet. Gopher was the first program that I used to access the web back in 1993. I still remember the first time that I saw the web browser Mosaic, demonstrated to me by a a colleague at the university that I worked at. It was all so amazing at the time.
Wow, the reporting of the computer Chronicles was ahead of the curve. They definitely had inside sources and connections from Industry. I thought the term "surfing the net" wasn't coined till around maybe 95'ish. 1993? Wow!
I still remember the very first time I ever used the Internet. Was the last week of school in the summer of 1997. Myself and the rest of the nerds in my school were tasked with building a website for the school, which we managed in about two days. The rest of the time was spent messing around on chatrooms and playing quake. Those were the days!
Man, i remember being a kid in the mid 90s and my dad bought our first family computer. It was a Macintosh performa with something like a 33mhz processor and 100mb hard drive. It also came with a 14.4k external dial up modem. This was my first time ever seeing the internet and my mind was absolutely blown. Later he upgraded to a 56k modem and my mind was blown again. Now I take my 400meg internet and 4.9ghz core I7 workstation for granted. My how times have changed. Cheers from Brandon Mississippi!
For those of you who don't think that 1993 was a long time ago: Bill Clinton references, Star Trek original series references, and a phone number you can dial to get help with going online (not to mention no actual web address for the show).
15 years old at this time, from Denmark. It would take around two years before I first heard the term "internet" in '95 . And four additional years before trying it myself. Man... most us simply had no idea what was about to happen. And it still took close to ten years from my first encounter before SoMe kicked in for real. So strange to think back on.
Wow. Those dialup noises in the background brings me back. My first internet connection was dialup 33.6k. Had windows 3.1 then upgraded to Windows 95 as we were recommended it as it was a better OS for the internet.
Back then as a kid, the concept of the internet itself was cool enough. Though I think if someone from the future told me about fibre and wi-fi, my head would have exploded like that dude from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Within the context of communication? No. My grandad owned a small boat-hire stall, and he used glass fibre to repair the boats. No-one would have put two and two together.
Henry Jones Jr. They already used glass fiber for backbones and transoceanic connections. One of the first glass fiber connection in the Federal Republic of Germany was between the Federal Republic of Germany and West Berlin if I'm not mistaking. The use of glass fiber connection began long ago.
Henry Jones Jr. By the way, I saw on an old documentary about the wall before the wall fell. There were workers who dug canals for a wire for telecomunication and television. When the workers spoke about its capacity for phone calls and TV-channels. And those capacities they spoke of are in a spectrum copperwire is incapable of. And here I even found that they worked on the fiber wire before the fall of the wall. www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13501023.html They called it Die Wunder-Leitung.
This is such a good episode. Historical. Important to know where this all comes from. In 1993, I was 13 years old, and into all of this. I recognized a lot of what is shown. Thank you.
17:05 Does anyone know if the Geek of the Week "podcast" still exists anywhere? I've googled around and can't find any of the old recordings of it. I really hope those still exist. It'd be super neat to give those a listen. edit - I have found them. town.hall.org/radio/Geek/
I remember seeing this show when it aired. It literally changed my life. And then many years later I found myself podcasting, not unlike what that Malamud guy was doing.
You mean Porn? Yes they always are looking for porn, and of course, the solutions to their homework, it is a real thing don't look it up, I sweat that is totally what they are doing.
I got my first email address at university in 1997, it was a very exciting feeling knowing that anyone around the world can send me a message and I would receive it immediately! In 1998 I subscribed to the internet for the first time. I took my PC to a shop which installed Netscape 3 and told me how to sign in, but I returned home still feeling confused and not knowing how this internet really works. That same year I created my first personal website and published it on Angelfire then went to a Computer Expo and browsed my website from there.
20:50 The WELL with the topic about the child with leukemia - far from the point of this video, but the few responses shown to the post really warm the heart. “Philcat, we’re here and we’re listening. We share your hope and your pain. Hang on.”
At the time when this episode of The Computer Chronicles - The Internet aired on TV, I didn't have much awareness of how the internet would become something essential in today's world. I myself wouldn't know how to live without the internet, as I use it for various things, from work to paying bills, streaming services, and much more. It's remarkable how the internet has become an integral part of my daily routine.
More about how it would play as being instrumental in everyday tasks for every person on earth, even in impoverished countries. Back then it was seen as mostly something for businesses or nerdy folks to use.
My 3 of my nieces, and my nephew know all too well what dialup is, and my oldest niece is now 21 with a baby boy of 1 year old, and they know because up till mid 08 all our area in S.C. could get was either dial-up 56K, or very expensive Sat. Internet. However when my great nephew comes of age in a few years, I'll thankfully as a retro PC gamer will be able to show him my retro Pentium 4 DOS/Win 98SE/XP SP3 build, that has a 56K modem installed, and connect to one of the last dial-up services, but it will be over MagicJack VOIP.
The Internet was the best thing that ever happened since business productivity. Very often, I spend lots of time on the Internet than producing office documents at home.
I remember in early days of "Internet". Internet cafe's everywhere, it seemed like it was really going to catch on! You hardly ever see an "internet cafe" these days. Shame, it seemed like "Internet" had a lot of potential.
I remember all the gopher, veronica, command lines etc.....I was hooked before 1993. Everyone I knew was not interested in the net and now everyone takes it for granted.
That first time as a kid, when you heard that modem bleep and bloop, and that connection established, you had the world at your fingertips...And most people you knew didn't even have a computer yet! Good times...
I so remember having a 286, with a whole entire meg of mem. LOL I upgraded to 4 megs for my 486 DX and probably could have made a down payment on a car. Unfortunately, I was alone among my friends. But that helped open up what we now have today. Love seeing these episodes, they were so informative at the time.
lol such pricks people are. This wasn't on youtube where he had all the time to do what he wanted. He was on a time limit to fit in as much as he could in as little time given for each segment.
1993: I want you to log onto the internet and while you're doing that, we're gonna run over to NASA... 2020: I want you to log onto the internet and- "Done"
23:15 "You can't trust everyone you meet in a virtual community until you meet them and get to know them offline." Too bad the world didn't heed Howard Reingold's wisdom
We decided to reverse it. Don't trust someone until you see their online persona. Also never meet someone in real life. I wish I could see where we go 100 years from now....assuming we're still around as a species
In 1995 I told a friend of mine «You wait and see, in the future we'll all watch porn on our computers connected to the Internet"... He laughed his head off and said.. «Yeah, there's never going to be that much bandwidth for good looking movies online.»
I remember 2show.exe on a 386 and passing floppies around which we got from cousins and older brothers. Some stuff was just weird... Alladin (Disney) porn in EGA/MCGA graphics (maybe it was 16 color VGA?) ? Yep, it existed back in 1995.
7:40 Please tell me I'm not the only one to laugh my ass off thinking about the frivolous shit we do with the amount of bandwidth that would've cost NASA thousands of dollars per hour back in the early 90's.
I'm just curious of the percentage of people have The Computer chronicles episodes on one tab of the browser, and porn of some variety -- on another. I'm guessing at least 3-5%.
@@mceltix2009 I almost always have something raunchy on one of my several screens, so it's very likely that I was watching amateur porn while watching this back then. These days, most of my bandwidth is consumed by my partners serenading me over video calls, so less frivolous than before, but still amazing that I can now video call another continent in full HD practically for free.
@@Hippida Around that time, I was playing Quake 2 and Age of Empires on MSN Gaming zone with a 33.6kbps modem. Soooo laggy, especially when I was hosting. I had dreams about dual ISDN, but it was out of our budget at the time.
30 years later, I am watching this wirelessly on my smartphone as I drink my morning coffee. It is amazing how far we have come, and exciting to imagine the future.
Back then: look at all the cool stuff you can find on the Internet! Today: let's go back 10 years on his Twitter feed and see what can get him fired! What the hell has happened to us??
