The Internet

Ah, the internet. At the dawn of the internet era it was clear that something magnificent was here with the potential to change the world, but it wasn't clear to what sector, or to what people. Today, it's become abundantly clear, that it's everyone and every thing.

Today, the internet is becoming even more ubiquitous than electricity, when considering our plethora of mobile devices. Even in 2000, there were pundits who asked the serious question of if people would be comfortable making purchases, paying bills, handling their banking, via the internet.

The remarkable scalability of the internet is also incredible to consider. That the system of pipes that went from delivering the static hypertext pages that the early-mid 90s to a few million people (which seemed huge at the time), to the globe-spanning, HD streaming, real-time videoing world of billions is incredible.

My Background

It was 1995 and I was 10, and via MSN, which back then was a decent dial-up internet service provider (and a PC-centric alternative to AOL, with more class than CompuServe). I had first gotten access to the internet and in South Korea, I became part of the 0.4% and rapidly growing share of the world that was connected to each other via the then-named "information superhighway". MSN was mostly still a curated published experience, and at that point, I was a budding PC gamer, and quickly connected with online communities for map making and save-game sharing. At the time, it was Doom, Sim City 2000, and later Warcraft II maps that I would share and publish. PC gamers were some of the first true devotees to internet culture, partly because of the nerd-level required to thoroughly maximize your gaming experience, but also because PC gaming generally is about tinkering and playing around in ways that encouraged experimentation and early adoption of technology.

Go check out the Way Back Machine and the nostalgic days of the 90s internet returns to me. Looking at the early internet is like looking back into childhood, remembering the days of buzzing dial-up models with speeds measured in kbps; where a 25 MB patch would take all night to download. Those were the days.