My latest assignment at the Pew Research Center had nothing to do with health and health care, but everything to do with my personal history as an internet geologist. Here’s the report: The Web at 25 in the U.S.
It was incredibly fun to spelunk in our survey archives, digging up the first national measures we took of technology adoption in the U.S.
I also dug into my personal archives, from my work as a researcher during the start-up phase of RealNetworks, in 1993-4. My task back then was to track the growth of the internet population, to gather market research in order to help make predictions about who might use our software. It’s hard not to laugh at the memos I wrote, but at least I knew they were important and kept them.
What are your first memories of the internet? And how did the Web change your experience (if you were online pre-Web)?
Snapshots from my life online:
1989: I used my dad’s CompuServe account to research and buy my first car, a 1984 silver Honda Prelude (sigh, I loved that car).
1991: My friend Aladdin (!) showed me an IRC and we chatted with people in Germany and Iceland, mostly about the weather.
1993: Working for RealNetworks meant that I got a 14,4 modem at home, which looked like a silver cigar box. I remember clicking on early websites, walking away for a little while, coming back to check on how much had downloaded, walking away again…
1994: Our internet service provider was ClarkNet, a Deaf-owned company. Customer support was done through TTY, which was frustrating. I knew what I needed, the ClarkNet tech knew what I needed, but the poor TTY operator had absolutely no idea what we were talking about. We all did a lot of spelling.
1995: I left RealNetworks to work for U.S. News & World Report magazine, helping them produce a CD-ROM version of their college guide and to launch their first website.
Quick sidebar: It seems funny now, but CD-ROMs were huge back then. Pew Research devoted a big section of a 1995 survey to measuring people’s attachment to it as a technology. For example: “Does your home computer have a CD-ROM drive? (If not sure, say: A CD-ROM drive uses a small shiny disk…the disks sometimes contain encyclopedias, elaborate games, and the like.)” and “How much would you miss your CD-ROM drive, if you no longer had one… a lot, some, not much, or not at all?”
What questions are we asking now that people will laugh at in 20 years?
Great, fun post Susannah. Not to give my age away but …
1979: played Battlestar on a dial up coupler for our rotary phone
1982: Played Battlestar 2.0 on new, speedy IBM Desktop (with dial-up rotary coupler)
1995:Using Netscape Navigator, got my Yahoo email address, and searched where the main page indicated the number off WWW sites being accessed somewhere in the 5 figure range
Thanks for reminding me how long I’ve been digitized ….
Howard
Love it! And let’s not be afraid to own our age & experience. It is too much fun to look back and see how far we’ve come.
Howard,
I still have a soft place in my heart for Netscape Navigator. Sigh.
Carmen
Oh, and I miss suck.com for its irreverent humor.
Wow, I’d forgotten about suck.com – “a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun.” Thank you!
A bunch of people tweeted back their internet milestones. Here’s a sample:
“I used CompuServe to sell collectible comic books on usenet newsgroups in 1994” – Sebastien Provencher
“1995 at UChicago: friend set up Mosaic for me & said it was for ‘the graphical part of internet’ and i asked why i needed that” – Nicholas Christakis
“It was the arpanet and Milnet back then. Less than 2,000 computers. Browsing via 80×24 ASCII – very matrix looking!” – Greg Eoyang
“Got my first 1200 baud modem right after I saw War Games. Maybe 1984 or 1985?” – Paul Dalen
“at the NCI 800-4-CANCER when we switched from modem access to www made access to PDQ database a dream.” – Julie Hodorowski
“I got my first email account & cell phone when I started college in 1996” – Kendra Gagnon
“In 1987 I played my first game on the Internet (a MUD).” – Barry Hollander
“I took a college class called “Intro to Information Superhighway” We built web sites and joined “chat rooms” – Sara Kehaulani Goo
“I remember my first ever connection through FTP to Cornell. Felt like landing on the moon!” – Julian Guitron, MD
And I have to quote Vic Sussman, my colleague at USNews, who, around 1996, corrected someone who was saying the internet is as revolutionary as the invention of the wheel. “No! It’s like the discovery of FIRE!” Everyone laughed but he was totally serious.
I remember asking Santa Clause for a computer when I was in kindergarten. For Christmas, the kids in my family got a Commodore 128. I was hot stuff in first grade when we got to use the Commodore 64 lab. 🙂 I helped classmates type in: Load “faye”,8
Oh, I forgot to mention… we had one of those modems where the phone receiver laid in it.
NICE. That is serious geek cred.
Learning BASIC when I was 7 on my dad’s RadioShack TRS-80 (1977). I coded a little man that walked sideways along the length of the screen. I kept messing up the code so when he moved his right leg, his knee would momentarily disappear :-). AOL chat rooms in 1995, and coding (also 1995) my first image map, realizing how staggeringly powerful (for me) the interaction around a simple clickable map could be. Thanks for posting this… It’s great to think about… adds much-needed perspective.
Thanks, Carla! That brings back memories for me, learning BASIC at elementary school. My dad worked for IBM so we were early PC adopters.
Last night I went to see a talk by danah boyd, who just released her book about teens & tech: “It’s Complicated: The social lives of networked teens.” (Free PDF on her site because yes she is that cool and thoughtful: http://www.danah.org/itscomplicated/). She talked about the power of tech in her own life as a teen, how her younger brother annoyed her at first by hogging the home phone line by hooking up his computer to it. Then, when she found out that “the internet is made of people” she got online with him and the world opened up. She is a tech historian as well as an incredibly insightful social observer. I asked about how she collected data in her fieldwork and learned yet another fascinating nugget: MySpace accounts were given out serially — so if you were the 15th person to sign up, you got #15. So she could randomly sample MySpace pages! Not true of later social networks, obviously.
Anyway, thanks for sparking that memory!
I had a special affinity to my mixed cassette tapes…spent a lot of time creating them with my double tape boom box… 🙂
Joyce, I still have a shoebox of my best mix tapes!! Not sure if I still even own a cassette player. It did feel like hacking, to be able to break apart those albums and re-assemble them. I was a master at dropping the needle and pressing Record at just the right moment.
1989 first CompuServe account; soon became a sysop (forum leader) on Ventura forum, then Desktop Publishing Forum, then ADD Forum, and others I can’t remember. What you describe as peer-to-peer healthcare is exactly what was happening on those graphic arts forums: when we couldn’t get the answers we wanted from the vendors (despite Quark’s outrageous support contract costs) we turned to each other… and got answers from OUR perspective.
Quite like how healthcare today is trying to figure out patient centered care – because they keep looking at it from the vendor’s perspective, not the user’s.
It’s hard to believe the Mozilla browser came along just five years later. I remember being immensely annoyed, because browsers weren’t yet clever enough to assume ANYthing, so “http://” (an obviously stupid thing) had to be typed manually. And, like Christakis, I was all like “Who needs this???”
btw, you said the Web at 25. My impression was that for all practical purposes the Web was born with the Mozilla browser, which turns 20 this year. What’s your criterion for the web’s bday?
Soooo much I want to say, but not until I’ve had some sleep…
The 25th anniversary marks the date that Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the memo describing the idea, which he circulated on March 12, 1989. I agree, however, that it didn’t fully flower until Marc Andreessen wrote Mosaic, the first browser.
btw, re desktop publishing vs peer to peer healthcare – check this out:
“We weren’t encouraged to ask questions, but to depend on the so-called experts… Not having a say in our own health care frustrated and angered us. We didn’t have the information we needed, so we decided to find it on our own.”
That’s from Miriam Hawley, one of the founders of Our Bodies, Ourselves. (See e-patients.net post 12/2009.)
Gotta love dem uppity wimmens, setting the course for everything e…
For those who are interested, the Twitter conversation about the 25th anniversary of the web is going to roll on for a few months, I think — search for #web25 or follow @pewinternet.
I tweeted this yesterday: “In 1995, 42% of U.S. adults had never heard of the internet” and it generated a stream of replies. Check it out:
https://twitter.com/SusannahFox/status/441264145141227522
And I’m capturing some of the conversation in a Storify:
http://storify.com/SusannahFox/the-web-at-25-in-the-u-s