Internet evolution

Doomsday prophecies about the death of this communication form or the other have been with us for such a long time that writing the previous post made me stop and think about what I was doing back in 1996, at the very start of the Internet revolution – or at least at the stage where it started to gain momentum among the wider population.

When the before mentioned Op-Ed writer wrote about how Internet was bound to fail and how nobody would want to communicate with each other via Internet, I was in California or Canada, which at the time felt to me as if it was somehow 'outside' the world, so I missed that particular Op-Ed and the debate that pursued it. While on the Westcoast I was working on a few stories, but as this was two months before I bought my first laptop, I probably wasn't able to file them until much later.

In fact, I remember how the year before, in 1995,  I was working on a student newspaper and one of the other student journalists, who had just returned from a year at a US university, was incensed that we didn't automatically get personal emails at the University of Oslo: we had to apply for them. It might even have been that we were only able to get them because we worked for a faculty newspaper, but my memory fails me at that point.

When I finally got my first laptop, a Compaq pentium 75 or similar, which lasted for six years, I signed up with Compuserve and stayed with them for a good long time. Compuserve provided an exasperatingly slow and at times unreliable connection, but the manual dial-up was cheaper to use abroad than my current mobile broadband, and you didn't have to spend time looking for free Wifi for a wireless modem, or for a place where a mobile broadband can pick up decent signals - a phone socket was enough. In this respect, what today would be considered ancient technology was easier to deal with – and I can't say I'm impressed with neither the speed nor the reliability of my mobile broadband, its only advantage is that it's mobile.