Day: November 27, 2015

I was not an online pioneer but I’ve been around it a while. This year marks 20 years of online presence and activity for me.

I’ve messed about with computers for close to 50 years but certainly the last 20 have made the biggest difference in my information lifestyle. An example: in 1994 we wanted to go to some West End shows when we visited London. I had to go to a local news vendor, buy a week old copy of the Telegraph and look up the entertainment ads to find out what was playing. In 1995 I went online and knew in 30 seconds. Information access has exploded since then so you can imagine how much things have changed for the average user.

What we do online, how we do it, what we see and hear, and how fast it happens have also changed dramatically over the past two decades. The way a person connected to an online provider in 1995 versus today is like comparing a hot air balloon to a Boeing 777 when it comes to travel.

So what was it like 20 years ago as an online early adopter? Only about 8% of Canadians were connected back then.

• First of all it was a S-L-O-W process. After you got connected your modem delivered content at 14.4 Kbps. A typical cell phone photo that gets casually sent to Facebook or Instagram today would take a couple of minutes to upload or download in 1995. Painful. I was green with envy when Sarah went to U. of Guelph in 1996, and got connected to T1 broadband at 100X the speed I had at home. Of course I have more than 20X that T1 speed in a consumer grade broadband hookup today.
• Second, it was expensive and inconvenient. You had to tie up your phone line when you were using the online service and maybe the dial-up number was long distance for you. You paid by the minute for access so often you dialed in, got your email and read it offline. So much for continuous access, huh?
• Third, in many cases you weren’t really on the Internet. The online providers had been around before the Web and most had their own proprietary way of delivering content. Prodigy (shown above) had a Videotext protocol called NAPLPS which provided the blocky and lurid graphics you see. Most of the stuff you read was their own content, although later  they came up with a crude browser that allowed access to the Web at large. It wasn’t as good as Netscape but it worked – after a fashion I guess.
• It was a text based world – email, bulletin boards, chat. Music and sound were possible but given the bandwidth restrictions you didn’t have really good audio. There were sound effects and brief spoken clips (WAV files) and music came in the form of MIDI – sort of a ricky-tick synthesizer groove. Web browsers needed a special plug-in to play MIDI files.
• Streaming video, music on demand, online gaming – fuhgeddaboudit. That was at least 10 years in the future – although the university kids had enough broadband access to download MP3s, and the beginning of the end for CDs arrived in the late 1990s.

Since 1995 we’ve obtained almost universal broadband access, home routers, wifi, mobile Internet, Roku, Netflix – not to mention Amazon and Google, worms and malware. Publishing a blog like this is almost trivially easy compared to 20 years ago. We’ve come a long way – and the Internet of things is on our doorstep now. I found it easy to be on the bleeding edge back then – now I’m a dinosaur. But I do know wifi. Go figure.