CDR: RE: I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story

[Lucky Green]

David,
I am afraid your interpretation of the history of mass-market access to the
Internet, as appealing as it may be to those blaming or praising Microsoft
for all the ills and good things of the digital universe, is quite
incorrect.

The Internet did not reach mass market penetration in the 1980's due to a
number of reasons, amongst them being that the average consumer didn't have:

o a GUI's
o cheap (or for that matter any) access to the Internet.
o IP to the home.
o a graphical web browser.

In the very early 90', not even shell accounts were available to the general
public. It wasn't until Netcom in the West and Pipeline and PSINet in the
East started offering flat-rate shell account access to the lucky few that
happened to live in the San Francisco Bay Area or NY that the average person
there could get any Internet access (other than email via AOL) at all.

But the VT100 renditions of gopher and even the marvelous lynx didn't
exactly draw big crowds.

Suddenly, the killer app Mosaic came about that was sufficiently compelling
to make the consumer want IP to the home. Since Mosaic, unlike lynx,
wouldn't work without an IP connection.

Meanwhile, SLIP/PPP accounts had just become available at any price.
Unfortunately, the USD 60 install and the USD 2 per hour charges proved
discouraging to all but a few. And again, unless you happened to live in one
of a few lucky areas, you didn't even have this rather pricey option.

The drive for Internet access came from Mac users. Few consumers had access
to Unix operating system based machines and Windows 3.1 lacked the Internet
applications. A host of which was readily available for the Mac and came
included on floppy in a book by Adam Engst that the novice Mac Internet user
probably wanted to read anyway. Most of them did.

Which left a single major barrier: $2/hour. This last and probably most
crucial barrier went away literally during the course of a weekend when a
Berkeley company called Cyberspace Development announced a revolutionary
product: The Internet Adapter (TIA). TIA was a user level program that
allowed the user to pull a SLIP connection out of a regular shell account.
The program spread like wildfire through the Netcom Macintosh user
community. Within that single weekend, dozens of people were using TIA.
Everybody said the same thing: "it works"!

Many shell providers banned TIA. Fortunately, Netcom did not. As one of
TIA's first users that very weekend, I wrote the "TIA mini-FAQ" on the spot,
explaining step-by-step in two pages how anybody with a Macintosh can get
hooked up with real IP within 30 minutes. At flat-rate shell prices. My
mini-FAQ was in stunningly high demand.

Faced with this sudden flat-rate competition, within a few months the first
SLIP/PPP provider went to a flat-rate model. Then another. Then a third.
Providers started sprouting up all over the place. People began using
Mosaic, which was quickly replaced by several other browsers that started
showing up for the Mac within a couple of months. Most of the improvements
in those new Mac browsers were copied by a new startup that was formed soon
thereafter. That company was Netscape. The remainder of Internet history I
presume most of us are aware of.

Enjoy,
--Lucky





--Lucky Green <shamrock at cypherpunks.to>

  "Anytime you decrypt... its against the law".
   Jack Valenti, President, Motion Picture Association of America in
   a sworn deposition, 2000-06-06


> -----Original Message-----
> From: cypherpunks at openpgp.net [mailto:cypherpunks at openpgp.net]On Behalf
> Of David Honig
> Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 19:46
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: Re: I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story
>
>
> At 03:29 PM 10/18/00 -0400, 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.
>
> Its quite simple.  In 1995 MS released a version of Windoze which
> included a TCP/IP stack by default.  Previously you had to acquire
> one and figure out how to install it.  While fortunes were made
> on this, the collection of routers known as the Net was unavailable
> to Joe Sixpack until then.
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