▲ 78 points
back
59 comments
I had a Minitel account in the 1980s. France Telecom rolled out Minitel in the US, although almost nobody noticed. Minitel had much of the functionality of the Web in a primitive form. There were online stores which accepted credit cards. Traffic maps of Paris. News and chat. Phone directories. Text porn. Social and dating sites. (One had to be able to write good poetry in French to get noticed.) Even paid sex chat ("tenderness service"). Most of the functionality of the Web was there, except images and video.
Minitel was a pay service; almost everything cost. The big surprise on the Web was that ads alone would pay for so much and that bandwidth would become so cheap.
> The big surprise on the Web was that ads alone would pay for so much
Another huge surprise was that people would create so much content (including really good content) for free. Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge, in hundreds of languages, thousands of times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica, that was created by random people and experts around the world almost entirely without payment.
Of course I'm talking about Wikipedia above, but that's just one of thousands of outstanding Web resources that people created for free.
I can just imagine the people's reactions 15 years ago: Why would anyone do that for free? Wouldn't the government shut it down? Who would pay to run the servers? Anything anyone would write for free would be garbage. You might get a few random people to write, but no subject-matter expert is going to waste their time.
> Another huge surprise was that people would create so much good content for free. Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge..
This wasn't too much of a leap for me. Microsoft Encarta shifted its information from CDs to the internet. And when you think about the whole premise of the internet, it was a tool for researches to share information. Remember all the university hosted sites packed with information? Now give all these people an easier place to publish their information while also reaching a wider audience.
One of my favorite pages from this era is probably this tide chart by someone at University of Nevada, Reno:
http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/edc/tides/2016/sfgg_fr16.htm...
And Stanford CS guys publishing their outdoor excursions:
I think for people in the free software community it was a bit more obvious. Before the internet became ubiquitous we already had random professionals creating world class software for free. For me, the biggest surprise is actually the opposite. I'm amazed at how well the music industry has managed to maintain a grasp on the popular music industry even though the tools to create and distribute music are essentially free. Although, I think it can't last to be honest. Already I watch more Youtube than TV and I don't think I'm alone (though admittedly I don't watch much of either).
> Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge
Wikipedia is far, far short of the total of 'all human knowledge'. It's probably a good primer for the type of information that consitutes such knowledge but it's barely skin-deep.
Even the British Library, for all its faults, holds magnitudes more information; it adds three million items every year, which is half as many as Wikipedia has total articles.
> Anything anyone would write for free would be garbage.
I think you would need to clarify to the person that there are just as many volunteer editors as there are volunteer writers. And then, perhaps, take them through a thought-experiment where fifty people are, in parallel, handed a copy of something and asked to mark it up for spelling and grammar errors. Even if they're all amateurs, the union of their annotations is likely to asymptotically approach (or even exceed) the results of a professional editor. Copyediting is actually uniquely suited for this sort of thing; it's, as they say, an embarrassingly parallel problem.
(Structural and content editing not-so-much, and Wikipedia indeed has deficits in those areas.)
Growing up in France in the late eighties, I once read an article in the gaming magazine Joystick that piqued my interest to no end. It was all about the wonderful world of téléchargement -- downloading -- through the Minitel.
Once I finally got my hands on the serial cable needed to connect the family's Minitel to my first computer, an Amstrad CPC6128, I was in business... As if by magic, a new game had teleported through the telephone network, materializing on a previously blank floppy disk. My 9-year old mind was well and truly blown! This was 1989 and I had just downloaded a game.
Never mind that the transfer took an eternity, resulting in a hefty charge to my parents' phone bill. Never mind that I had very little interest in the game itself -- it was only Bubble Bobble, after all. No, the downloading process is what fascinated me. A whole new world of possibilities had just opened up.
But a year later I was crestfallen: we had moved to the United States and there was no Minitel. Perhaps fortuitously, there were no Amstrad computers either. The complete lack of Amstrad software stateside was solid ground for requesting a new computer. Now armed with a brand new 286 PC and a 2400 baud modem, the Minitel was soon forgotten as I discovered the joys of local BBSes, inevitably ending up running a rather popular one of my own.
America may not have had the Minitel, but it more than made up for it with a thriving BBS scene, fostered by those gloriously free local phone calls.
The funny thing was that in the US, there was Minitel. But you had to get a terminal, or a PC emulator for one.
France Telecom deployed dial-in ports in most US cities. It was popular with French expatriates, because there was no extra charge to reach services in France.
There was a failed attempt by a Silicon Valley company, "101 Online", to deploy Minitel terminals in the US. The terminals were available in electronics surplus stores for years.
Note, however, that charges (or lack thereof) for local phone calls varied greatly by region. Major cities like New York or Chicago had "message units," and a customer would get X message units free per month, depending on the service plan. In general, a local call was one unit, while calls further out within the metro area would be billed several units at the beginning and one per minute afterward. In some cases, unlimited plans were available at a hefty price.
Other areas, like Atlanta, had unlimited calling over a wide area, while rural areas often only offered toll-free calling within town, or perhaps to one or two nearby towns.
I miss the local BBS scene of that era, but I don't miss the hassle of analog modems, long-distance charges, and (by today's standards) laughably slow speeds. Even a low-end smartphone is light-years ahead of 1980s tech.
Amazingly, FidoNet is still a thing, though many of its systems are now on the internet instead of analog modems. It might come in handy again if the internet apocalypse happens.
I remember there were almost no visitors from France on my websites, back in 2000. Many were still on Minitel. From Wikipedia: "In 2005, there were 351 million calls for 18.5 million hours of connection, generating €206 million of revenue, of which €145 million were redistributed to 2,000 service providers (these numbers were declining at around 30% per year). There were still six million terminals owned by France Télécom,". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
I read that Germany had something similar called BTX from Bundespost, but that died a few years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext
Minitel has been kept on life support for many many years for a very specific service: Teleroute, a european freight exchange.
Since about 2003, a website existed but French small transporters were very, very slow to move to the web.
As it was a pay as you go, it was a cash machine for FT/orange (and marginally for Teleroute) we had to keep the minitel infrastructure alive and in sync with the website and rest apis. Mixing state of the art webservices and decade old infrastructure was a nice challenge.
The thing we dread the most: having to change graphical elements in videotex format.
It was the same in the UK Prestel (our equivalent of minitel) was kept going for travel agents long after the main service died
I used to have a minitel in my collection of oddball terminals when I worked for BT
I had a GENIE (iirc: General Electric Network Information Exchange) account in the DC area of the US in the 1980s. It was similar- email, and online 'Mall', and so on.
"In fact, the web is so pivotal to modern life that two months ago, the UN declared internet access a basic human right."
This doesn't sit right with me. It's certainly not being treated as one. I keep encountering "free wifi" hotspots - unencrypted, slow networks asking you to get your credit card out for more than 5 minutes of their time.
I was just in germany last week. In a public airport, the wifi was so monetized I felt like I was in the iOS port of a facebook game. Had the choice between that, or some even worse sitekiosk locked down piece of crap.
I wonder when this will change. When wifi will be as abundant and accessible as water in a city. (Although Germany is a terrible example for this - good luck getting a glass of tap water there). It's funny-sad to contrast the wonders of the internet, to the unending shithole that is internet access in 2016.
I don't think the fact that some Internet access is crap negates this observation. Why should it have the same distribution and access qualities as water? It's a completely different thing. The right suggests that everyone should be able to reasonably take part in the Internet, not that it should be available for free everywhere and at the same quality. Almost everyone in developed countries can get access to it regularly for nearly no money. Developing countries are getting there too.
You overestimate how the "basic human right" is treated.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has 30 articles, almost every single one was and is being trampled on everyday.
Well, an alternative (and more charitable) reading is that these are negative rights.
Having the right to internet doesn't mean that someone else has a duty to provide you with a (free) internet connection, it means that forcibly preventing you from procuring an internet connection is not allowed (as opposed to, say, drugs, which you CAN be forcibly prevented from procuring).
Compare freedom of expression: Nobody can forcibly prevent you from expressing yourself, but also, nobody has a duty to enable you to express yourself.
That and the increasing disdain for human rights in western civilisation, which was supposed to be leading the way. Popular attitudes started to shift on 9/11, and support for "enhanced questioning" and indefinite detention without charge or trial has done nothing but grow, since.
We are told practically every day that terrorists, paedophiles, and werewolves (I made that one up) hide behind the shield of human rights, thus threatening us all, and if you're a good citizen you don't need human rights because you've done nothing wrong.
The current government in the UK has a manifesto commitment to repeal human rights legislation, and much to the relief of terrified voters, intend to follow through on it.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/63635/human-rights-act-will-be-scra...
Going to a bathroom is a basic human right too. However, you still have to pay $ to access a public one in a lot of places. Let's fix that first.
You're right, let's forget the internet and focus on bathrooms, since they're obviously mutually exclusive... sigh.
In Germany you can just go into any bathroom and drink the water / refill your bottle there.
The public WiFi is terrible though, I agree.
Why not just pick up a €10 pay-as-you go LTE SIM? It's faster than WiFi, works nearly everywhere and is super cheap.
Setting aside the practicality issue (makes my regular number unreachable, requires ID in many countries, in an airport I probably don't have one, etc), my point was only to highlight what we currently accept as the status quo of public wifi.
I've often wondered how much the Web as we know it depends on the current level of technology (bandwidth, resolution, processing speed, storage), vs how much it depends on the fact that it has a critical mass of people using it? Sure, sites such as Youtube would have a hard time over a 28.8k modem (not to mention low resolution/low color displays and slow CPUs). But things like Facebook or other community sites could still essentially exist and perform most of their function.
Or is it that without current bandwidth, that even basic items (such as sharing low resolution pictures) would limit it to those who have enough patience? And how much of the ability to design modern web app interfaces is responsible for drawing in the masses? Is the eye candy what actually sells the net to the average person (in order to obtain critical mass)?
I think there is a lot of evidence that these days the technology and performance is in almost all cases much better than needed.
Large parts of the Internet are essentially nothing more than shipping text to users. Yet almost everyone doing this does so with hundreds of kilobytes of javascript. There's an almost crazy tendency to stuff all kinds of functionality into it that nobody asked for (e.g. news pages showing popups that a new item appeared on the startpage). Pretty much all of that would work with 1998s Internet without a whole lot of loss.
Youtube is a more extreme example, but even there: The resolutions they support today are probably irrelevant for more than 90% of the content.
In the days of dialup it was more common to fetch a bunch of resources for offline viewing (e.g. newsgroups, POP email, downloading Web sites, and later using "accelerator" browser plugins and RSS).
Not only was it much faster to browse locally, but it also saved money since connections were pay-per-minute.
Whilst social media sites would still work under such restrictions, I think there'd be less emphasis on short back-and-forth conversations, and maybe less of a 'walled garden' effect; since the content would be saved locally, I imagine a variety of 'Facebook reader' applications springing up, scraping and presenting the information in different ways.
There would also be implications for the ads and tracking which many sites subject their visitors to.
When you talk about the web as we know, are you talking aesthetics, or ecosytems? I'm having trouble drawing the comparison between technology vs critical mass of people.
How the web looks has definitely changed with technology as we progressed from HTML -> Flash sites -> HTML5 and single-page web app sites, and of course now we can have streaming video that works as opposed to Quicktime or RealPlayer movies.
And when you think of Twitter's rise, it's essentially blogging shrunk to one-liners, but what made it different was the ability to aggregate everyone's stream of consciousness to a single feed as opposed to browsing through a newsgroup, blog ring, or RSS reader. This couldn't happen without technology (though I guess a parallel could be forum threads where everyone posts their clipboard contents at that moment).
In terms of ecosystems, I feel like they haven't changed too much. I checked Alexa's Top Sites and was able to draw parallels to most of them except for Wikipedia and to a certain extent YouTube. Collaborative editing of a collective source of (arguable) truth is definitely something of the 21st century, and YouTube's celebrity videologgers didn't quite exist unless you count the old Justin.tv (and that still required technology).
> And how much of the ability to design modern web app interfaces is responsible for drawing in the masses?
I would say the ease of expression is what brings in the masses. People may seem passive when they consume information now, but they still want to interact, and they do now do that through re-tweets or comments. I do think long-form content is diminishing because of our medium.
Facebook with photos would have been unusably slow in the 1990s, though nobody would have had digital cameras anyway. A decade later, it would have been too much of a pain for those who did have them to post many pictures to their streams, since this was before smartphones made photo uploading easy. And a Facebook without photos would never reached the billion-user mark.
Usenet and bbses existed for years. But something like Facebook would not have received critical mass with video and pics. Of course suicidal media on general wouldn't have gotten critical mass without a smart phone.
> suicidal media
Now there's an interesting typo. (Or was that intentional?) Strangely fitting, even.
Interesting. When I was first using Facebook, I think nobody I knew had a smartphone. Most people may browse social media from their phones now, because it's convenient and the sites have streamlined their experience for that - but before mass adoption of smartphones, people did fine with a desktop browser.
Another interesting prediction was Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead" (1995) book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...
The Microsoft Network (MSN v1, MSN dialup) failed spectacularly and the WWW won, Bill Gates rewrote the whole book in less than a year, the paperback edition already featured the WWW instead of Information Super Highway and MSN/Microsoft Network. Windows 95 shipped with MSN integration, an addon "Plus" CD shipped Internet Explorer 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-up#Early_history
I actually think the CBC guy has some validity still. Certainly civility falls apart quickly in large groups like Reddit or Twitter where most interactions are one-offs, but in small ones (irc channels and forums), even where there are major political disagreements I've seen surprisingly good handling. Even the worst of those horrible terrible trolls/harassers/cyberbullies/<other bullshit here> often has somewhere they're more accepted and accepting.
Those fond of the genre should pick up a copy of Laura Lee's "Bad Predictions", a great compendium of all sorts of now-foolish statements: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Predictions-Laura-Lee/dp/09657345...
The author says "the least likely element of this scenario is that Kellogg's will bring back free gifts". I have at home a bunch of squashy balls, eagerly sought by my son, from Kellog's Frosties from the time of Six Nations Rugby tournament this year. Does she know something I don't?
Counterpoint to Stoll being wrong: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-actually-th...
Yeah, every time someone trots out that article, I think that he was wrong about a lot of details and right about a lot of the broad implications.
I think the author is being quite unfair regarding John Allen's "prediction" on anonymity.
First and foremost, it wasn't even a prediction. Second, his comments concerned anonymity within groups and communities, not general demographics, i.e. all users of Twitter. The referenced study linked to by the Guardian (statistically illiterate as ever) article also fails to demonstrate anonymity as a primary cause of abuse, as the author seems to imply, albeit in a passive-aggressive manner.
Well, it's still true that CD-ROMs [or rather, 'digital lessons'] actually don't take the place of a competent teacher. Some autodidacts can go very far with digital materials, but for Jane and John Q Public, teachers are better than digital lessons. They're just more expensive, is all.
Plus, of course, there are particular topics that are much better suited for one style or the other, but in general, a competent meat teacher is better than a competent silicon one.
There are also very small number of high quality teachers to go around.
Being from India, I had pretty bad teachers in college. If it wasn't for MIT opencourseware, and other videos I found online, I wouldn't have learned anything at all.
"a competent meat teacher is better than a competent silicon one"
... for now, and even then I'm not so sure.
Edit: And what about a competent teacher that records one lesson and broadcasts it to millions?
> in general, a competent meat teacher is better than a competent silicon one
That's true, but it's one that has to be observed modulo the availability of competent meat teachers (skilled in the relevant subject). These are in short supply, certainly in the developing world -- but even in the schools and universities of the developed world, the availability of teachers in any subject is generally limited to a few hours a day, and for enrolled students only.
I think they should be seen a complementary, especially for younger students, but the availability of a competent silicon teacher in any of a wide range of subjects, for anyone, anytime, anywhere is huge.
>teachers are better than digital lessons.
What about a combination of the two[1]? I.e. recording digital lessons and then using a community question and answer forum to fill in the gaps.
I think this author is confused between what the Internet is and what the WWW is.
Slightly related, I think it's a foregone conclusion that in 25 years we'll poke fun in the same way at current thinking about electric cars, self driving cars, solar power, etc.
Give Clifford Stoll some credit; his predictions about low quality online discussions and questionable value in educational software have some merit.
Couldn't read it. Website wanted me to disable malware protection in my browser.