----- Original Message ----- From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
At 12:22 10/18/2000 -0700, jim bell wrote:
I ask this, what I believe would be an excellent idea for an article: Why didn't the Internet develop even faster than it actually did? 9600 bps modems existed in 1986, not all that far in performance behind 28Kbps units. By 1986, numerous clones of the IBM PC and AT existed.
Internet deployment happened at a near-doubling every year starting around 1993, coincident with the deployment of the web.
That sounds fast to the non-computer-literate public. But I expect it was nothing compared to the (business) market penetration of fax machines in 1985 and 86. That, and the thousands (tens of thousands?) of computer bulletin-boards during that timeframe showed clearly that people wanted to communicate using computers, in whatever ways were made available.
Most computers in 1986 weren't up to it. Many of us were using Apple II computers with something like 278x192 resolution (in single hi res mode). Imagine such a beast doing networking. Ick. -Declan
Well, I didn't say that it would look as beautiful as it does today, with fancy graphics and all that, but a lot of what the internet does today (email, program transfer, some buying and selling) could still have been done then, albeit a bit slower. And it was; the problem is that 99+% of the population couldn't get it, and certainly not for a reasonable price. Imagine how many cars Detroit would sell if only 1% of the population had access to the roads. Other people have answered, and it sounds to me like the NSF (Insufficient Funds?) simply kept the Internet bottled up by limiting access to it to universities and government contractors. Only when they let go of the controls did things really take off. Typical government bureaucracy. Jim Bell