It got its current name 2013. It was a merger 1998 of "Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building" and the one responsible for transport. The urban development department was responsible for internet infrastructure not the transport one.
I recently learned that one of the major competition regulators in Germany is called the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur or BNetzA), which oversees electricity, gas, telecommunications, post, and railway markets.
Given my own relatively recent realisation that virtually all industrial monopolies can be considered (sometimes with some mental gymnastics) as networks, this is an interesting bit of confirmation.
Ironically, I just ran into this phrase last week while reading an anthropology paper from the 90's ("Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala")
Whenever I hear this phrase it reminds me the part in the book Cryptonomicon where the pretentious humanities professor feels so clever for asking "How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?"
Oh, ugh... Memories of all the awful road metaphor headlines of the time are flooding back-- "Breaking Down on the Information Superhighway", "Traffic Jams...",
I heard that so many times in the 1990's in France, "les autoroutes de l'information". I knew that politicians were running after what the USA do, but I did not realize that they were also translating and recycling the very same words.
I just realized it while watching that 1994 video :-)
I've been reading Douglas Copeland's 1994 novel "Microserfs" recently and there's a bit where the main character starts reading up on actual highway construction in response to the information superhighway.
He did write a sequel of sorts to Generation X called Generation A in 2009. I haven't read it so I can't comment on it, though I suspect it is already 'of it's time' in the way that, say, Microserfs is. It's a fun novel to be sure, for something that emanates a huge "now-ness circa 1994" it's still very enjoyable today, but maybe that's because I can vaguely remember life back then. I'd wonder what a younger reader might think about it?
ARPANET was basically military and educational, and was pre-web. I remember using a 300 baud acoustic coupler to dial into a university computer c.1980; there really wasn't a whole lot you could do with it back then - just simple text-based stuff like telnet (remote login) and command-line based e-mail (SMTP) as well as FTP. Even things like IRC, Usenet, Archie, Gopher all came later.
While the commercial internet, allowing companies and consumers to connect, grew out of ARPANET, it obviously was commercially funded, with backbones built out by the telecoms, etc. I think for most people today the term "internet" is essentially synonymous with "web" - stuff they can do in their browser, which of course came a lot later. HTML and HTTP were only invented c.1990, and this was the beginning of the internet as people today know it. Even then, a lot of people only saw the internet as filtered through AOL.
Err, for a while, they didn't. But soon enough new gatekeepers and middlemen (GAFA, Paypal) returned which not only had we hoped to get rid of, but even paid public money (ARPA, CERN, W3C) and established net neutrality legislation for, in vain.
Didn't Europe, with their combined industry and government coordinated plan, leap frog US connection speeds, where things were left only to the market?
Even the order form is still there, ready for your credit card. There's a link on the order form, "credit card concerns"...
> "...we feel that using a credit card here may be more secure than using it at your local restaurant. We don't know. We haven't had a problem in this area."
I guess "we don't know" covers them just in case things go wrong!
Display advertising will show you products that you have expressed an interest in today.
Streaming video has ad slots similar to traditional linear TV because it's what people are used to. There is the opportunity to do much much more.
What I could see happening is content changing to be tailored to the viewer. This would both decrease subscriber churn in the increasingly competitive streaming space, as well as add a feature to advertise via the content itself.
You like the pants? Point your remote at them to purchase with a single click. Honestly, I could see Amazon sponsoring streaming content for that purpose. AWS has streaming services and Amazon has been doing the logistics for decades.
I envision clothing & hairstyles being changed in the same video from one year to another, or even customized per viewer demographic. Admins could simply toss some product links over and let the ML do its thing.
Of course, this would require a ton of standardization of product types and categories, which I could see being difficult to get consensus on. Perhaps one company/consortium would corner the market and just use human labor to fill the gaps where automation isn't ready, much as is often done today.
Set up an API that allows anyone to tag videos and earn a commission in sales based on that tag. Let them figure out where it makes sense to invest the effort and how to automate it.
This is one of those features that people think they want, and would cost Netflix a ton of money, but would ultimately become filled with spam and would only have a small number of power users. It's a big money pit that does little to retain users and generate revenue. "More social" has been pitched to Spotify countless times and it would likely face a similar fate.
Yep just like all apples attempts. If iTunes can’t even leverage its install base (ubiquitous back then) to make Ping a success (remember Ping?! I was one of the dozens of active users) around music or Game Center social features around games then I don’t see why it’d be any different for video.
why would building an entire social network cost a ton of money? it’s an entirely different product - dozens of features and content moderation just to get something simple out there…
They had this feature (sort of). I don't remember if you could recommend movies to others, but you could have friends and see each other's viewing history.
This has been tried ... numerous times. I recall a brief-lived CBS Interactive site / app in the late aughts. Went nowhere.
Most such interaction now occurs within extant social groups. Much as you'd watch a TV show or go to a theatre with friends, most people now discuss films on their self-centric social media. FB / Instagram / Reddit / Twitter, etc., usually with at least some people they know directly.
Conversing with absolute strangers has far less appeal.
Well, CBS Interactive is a branch of CBS, the broadcaster.
A decade and a half ago, its reach was greater than Netflix's.
My point wasn't the scale of the hosting network but the failure of broadcaster- (or program-originator-) centric "interactive" television concepts. I think the trope existed even when Neil Postman was writing his books ... not sure if this shows up in Amusing Ourselves to Death or Technopoly, or both, though I think it does. They're 1980s / 1990s. Postman died in 2003 though, so if it was him, it was early in Internet time.
Wikipedia lists attempts dating to the 1950s, though these were not networked interactions. Those existed, however, by 1977.
Netflix doesn't want to look bad when they see things on your list that are no longer available. I guess they could hide/remove them but then it looks bad to the list creator.
The much more wild thing is that Amazon Prime Video doesn't do this. The overall interface and concept is not far from the "X-Ray" view that Amazon already has... and, of course, they have a built in retailer you could order from.
> On March 1990 they published the document RFC1060 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1060) where they listed the well-known ports at that time. In that list there wasn't a protocol assigned to port 80. It went from 79 to 81:
So at 1994, 80 is pretty much the default, but sometimes it was specified anyways, just like some addresses you see around still prints/shows http:// / https://. Not everyone know what part of the URI is important or not.
I figured that it was someone's idea to get above the 1024 mark when all they had was a shell account and people weren't using :8080 yet. It could also be that "virtual hosting by name" wasn't a thing yet so a single computer hosting multiple sites had to break it out by port.
That is correct, there was no way to have multiple hosts on the same machine. One of the start-ups I helped build (engineer #2) in early 1997 (which still exists today in some form that many young, single men have spent quality time alone with) had a landing page, so that if your browser did not provide the host header, it would give you an index page of all the salacious sub websites/sub-domains available that you could then click on - it was an image map, naturally. We were very careful to keep the heterosexual and the homosexual offerings on physically separated servers so that customers did not complain about "accidentally" clicking on content that they didn't want to see. Latest versions of Netscape at the time supported the host header, but Internet Explorer very explicitly did not. And IE was the default for many people just getting online for the first time outside of AOL/Compuserve.
I don’t remember why, but many engineering schools, including the one I was attending, used 8080 for department websites. I feel like that was the second most common that I saw.
I think it would have more to do with Fiber to the Node allowing ISPs to only half-upgrade their infrastructure and still achieve workable broadband, even if having the foresight to do straight fiber would have been a much better goal to work towards at the time.
1. This brought me back. When she clicked into the "mall" and the navigation was an imagemap with hotlinks [1] going off to a flower shop, I immediately thought of a website that some guy payed me to build back in the 90's when I was in high school. He bought SellMemphis.com, SellAtlanta.com, etc and wanted to create a directory for local businesses. Also - good on you, Philips Flowers, for keeping 1800florals.com in what must've been intense pressure from 1800flowers.com!
2. We still can't buy items directly in-stream. However, product placement is huge, and not just for consumer goods. Music featured in Stranger Things ends up trending on Spotify. Apple creates a playlist (in its own platform) for "Defiant Jazz," featured in Severance, also on its own platform).
3. Regulation (or lack of regulation) played out in an interesting way. We now have an interesting problem with digital infrastructure in the US anyway, where copper cables (still) only get you so far, wireless is the new expectation, and countries that -had- no comms infrastructure are by default more modern now than large tracts of the US, because they skipped past the "telephone poll" phase straight to cell towers.
Cell towers are not a replacement for wired connections. There's only so much data rate you can have for a given frequency bandwidth[1]. Wires (or fibers) work around this because the medium isn't shared. Each wire has the entire spectrum for itself.
I suppose it is easier to run one major fiber line to a cell than it is commit to FTTH. Still I though this was a half-deserved dig at how outside of cell-service many more rural parts of North America still top out at decades old ADSL, and the places that do have good broadband are often via cable tv infrastructure (DOCSIS). I suppose if someone did build new infrastructure from scratch they would just start at LTE/5G and laying fiber to the premises, why start anywhere else?
The only reason this isn't a thing yet is because consumers don't ask for it and companies don't want heat for making their entertainment "all about the money".
We will definitely see something like that soon, is my bet. Perhaps not "AI" which is able to inspect the scene from a video feed and recognise items for your convenient weekend shopping (say you wanted to purchase the vase used in movie X, or the drapes from tv-show Y). But we're not far off...
Based on past experience, it is going to look a lot like the internet of today. Things just don't move that fast that 9 years will make much of a difference.
Vernor Vinge saw it coming too. In his 1992 sci-fi novel “A Fire Upon the Deep,” set in the far future, the internet is called “The Net of a Million Lies”:
well, 28 years after airing of this report, most UK & EU internet services are now provided by a few American companies. for other smaller countries in Asia and Africa, things are probably worse, they are pretty much denied for their digital sovereignty with all essential online services, privacy data and sometimes the infrastructure itself completely controlled by those few companies.
I built a retro 486 PC, bought a modem and could not find any dial-up ISPs in Australia. The 19xx prefix is not dial-able using VoIP line that I set up (we don't have POTS lines anymore).
I would - unironically - love to build an 'early internet' where we could dial in (or just emulate it via an intentionally low-bandwidth, high-latency layer over home wifi). Go back to chat rooms, islands of communities centered around a particular topic.
There is a device you connect to your computer port and it can emulate dial up. It connects to your wifi but your computer sees it as a modem, then you type regular AT commands and instead of a number it connects to telnet BBSs.
World Wide Web (or WWW) is too long to say and "The Web" never really caught on, but the Internet is not quite accurate. It feels like we need a word to differentiate IP from HTTP. Though, since we haven't come up with one yet, I guess we will just have to live with the WWW being called the Internet.
What exactly is your requirement for ‘the web’ catching on?
It’s used very often on ycombinator in submission titles and comments. I see it used by millennials and gen z on Discord, though more commonly as an adjective, eg ‘oh is it just web or is there an app?’
Sometimes they drop ‘the’ and it becomes “hey i saw this on web.” Online Korean comics are usually just called webtoons instead of manhwa. It’s used on corporate sites, ads, hotel amenities descriptions and in references to ‘the dark web.’
>It feels like we need a word to differentiate IP from HTTP.
We really don't, because technical accuracy isn't relevant to the vast majority of people, who aren't discussing protocols to begin with.
And anyway,I think people stopped referring to "the internet" in general once it became ubiquitous enough that it became more useful to refer to specific sites instead, or genres of services like social media. I think the only time people use "the internet" anymore is in reference to their ISP, eg: "the internet" going down.
It has to do with what protocol they are using to communicate with the server/cloud/whatever. If they are using HTTP/S (hyper text transfer protocol) then it is web/www. Otherwise, it is some other protocol. For example, email (technically) uses SMTP (simple message transfer protocol).
However, all of these run on top of the Internet Protocol (IP). So, everything is internet, but not everything on the internet is http.
Apps are almost certainly using HTTP under the hood to communicate with their servers, so technically they are a part of the web, which is a part of the internet.
"Web" absolutely caught on. Web browser, web site, web app, web designer, web developer, web cam, (we)blog, web comic, surfing the web. These are all words most people know and use.
Funny thing that sending an e-mail to the president (Brazilian president) was one of the first things I did when got online (1995). It was basically Playboy website and this till I found IRC :p
Hahaha, brilliant. As a kid in UK IRC then Napster freed my mind from isolation due to my geekiness. There was one other kid in school into programming then getting online there was whole world.
We didn’t even have free local calls so being able to chat with a F/14/California was mind blowing! Funny how many of them there were…
A wag once observed that the purpose of TV programming is to keep you in your chair for the ads. Product placement blurs this line. So commercial-free MTV was all "product" placement, all the time ?
203 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] thread"Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Network_Agency>
Given my own relatively recent realisation that virtually all industrial monopolies can be considered (sometimes with some mental gymnastics) as networks, this is an interesting bit of confirmation.
Whenever I hear this phrase it reminds me the part in the book Cryptonomicon where the pretentious humanities professor feels so clever for asking "How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?"
I just realized it while watching that 1994 video :-)
Fun fact: Queen Elizabeth sent an email in 1976. Or more likely she pressed a button.
While the commercial internet, allowing companies and consumers to connect, grew out of ARPANET, it obviously was commercially funded, with backbones built out by the telecoms, etc. I think for most people today the term "internet" is essentially synonymous with "web" - stuff they can do in their browser, which of course came a lot later. HTML and HTTP were only invented c.1990, and this was the beginning of the internet as people today know it. Even then, a lot of people only saw the internet as filtered through AOL.
Even the order form is still there, ready for your credit card. There's a link on the order form, "credit card concerns"...
> "...we feel that using a credit card here may be more secure than using it at your local restaurant. We don't know. We haven't had a problem in this area."
I guess "we don't know" covers them just in case things go wrong!
If implemented now, what about in 2032 when you're watching re-runs from 2022?
What if the store goes bust or styles change?
Display advertising will show you products that you have expressed an interest in today.
Streaming video has ad slots similar to traditional linear TV because it's what people are used to. There is the opportunity to do much much more.
What I could see happening is content changing to be tailored to the viewer. This would both decrease subscriber churn in the increasingly competitive streaming space, as well as add a feature to advertise via the content itself.
You like the pants? Point your remote at them to purchase with a single click. Honestly, I could see Amazon sponsoring streaming content for that purpose. AWS has streaming services and Amazon has been doing the logistics for decades.
I envision clothing & hairstyles being changed in the same video from one year to another, or even customized per viewer demographic. Admins could simply toss some product links over and let the ML do its thing.
Of course, this would require a ton of standardization of product types and categories, which I could see being difficult to get consensus on. Perhaps one company/consortium would corner the market and just use human labor to fill the gaps where automation isn't ready, much as is often done today.
Spam would be a huge problem, of course.
I’m not asking for a Facebook clone I just want to be able to have friends and make lists for them and they make lists for me.
Most such interaction now occurs within extant social groups. Much as you'd watch a TV show or go to a theatre with friends, most people now discuss films on their self-centric social media. FB / Instagram / Reddit / Twitter, etc., usually with at least some people they know directly.
Conversing with absolute strangers has far less appeal.
A decade and a half ago, its reach was greater than Netflix's.
My point wasn't the scale of the hosting network but the failure of broadcaster- (or program-originator-) centric "interactive" television concepts. I think the trope existed even when Neil Postman was writing his books ... not sure if this shows up in Amusing Ourselves to Death or Technopoly, or both, though I think it does. They're 1980s / 1990s. Postman died in 2003 though, so if it was him, it was early in Internet time.
Wikipedia lists attempts dating to the 1950s, though these were not networked interactions. Those existed, however, by 1977.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_television>
> In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee issued the first version of HTTP in a document about HTTP 0.9 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html) where he stated:
>> If the port number is not specified, 80 is always assumed for HTTP.
> Then in July 1992 was published RFC 1340 that obsoletes RFC 1060 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1340) where appears:
> That document makes official the port 80 as www or http. [...]From https://superuser.com/a/996843
So at 1994, 80 is pretty much the default, but sometimes it was specified anyways, just like some addresses you see around still prints/shows http:// / https://. Not everyone know what part of the URI is important or not.
2. We still can't buy items directly in-stream. However, product placement is huge, and not just for consumer goods. Music featured in Stranger Things ends up trending on Spotify. Apple creates a playlist (in its own platform) for "Defiant Jazz," featured in Severance, also on its own platform).
3. Regulation (or lack of regulation) played out in an interesting way. We now have an interesting problem with digital infrastructure in the US anyway, where copper cables (still) only get you so far, wireless is the new expectation, and countries that -had- no comms infrastructure are by default more modern now than large tracts of the US, because they skipped past the "telephone poll" phase straight to cell towers.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19990208003609/http://branch.com...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theo...
The only reason this isn't a thing yet is because consumers don't ask for it and companies don't want heat for making their entertainment "all about the money". We will definitely see something like that soon, is my bet. Perhaps not "AI" which is able to inspect the scene from a video feed and recognise items for your convenient weekend shopping (say you wanted to purchase the vase used in movie X, or the drapes from tv-show Y). But we're not far off...
Maybe there was some upside to that though, encouraging people not to stay on the computer for too long...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs
<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193>
Sources / instances date to the 1980s or earlier, addressing specifically the false assertion by many that "nobody saw this coming".
https://www.tor.com/2009/06/11/the-net-of-a-million-lies-ver...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CRatTuWdT_Q
Also thanks for getting Bo stuck in my head for the rest of the day. That song has all the answers.
It would be trivial to set up a VoIP service restricted to outbound POPs.
Ed Krol's The Whole Internet
https://archive.org/details/wholeinternetuse00krol
It’s used very often on ycombinator in submission titles and comments. I see it used by millennials and gen z on Discord, though more commonly as an adjective, eg ‘oh is it just web or is there an app?’
Sometimes they drop ‘the’ and it becomes “hey i saw this on web.” Online Korean comics are usually just called webtoons instead of manhwa. It’s used on corporate sites, ads, hotel amenities descriptions and in references to ‘the dark web.’
What more do you need?
It had that girl from the bus.
We really don't, because technical accuracy isn't relevant to the vast majority of people, who aren't discussing protocols to begin with.
And anyway,I think people stopped referring to "the internet" in general once it became ubiquitous enough that it became more useful to refer to specific sites instead, or genres of services like social media. I think the only time people use "the internet" anymore is in reference to their ISP, eg: "the internet" going down.
For example, I assume all the "apps" don't count as WWW? But some services (most?) have their web versions, so it's kinda hard to distinguish.
However, all of these run on top of the Internet Protocol (IP). So, everything is internet, but not everything on the internet is http.
Apps are almost certainly using HTTP under the hood to communicate with their servers, so technically they are a part of the web, which is a part of the internet.
That is my memory. There is some sort of gov standardisation towards that. Read some ietf papers in u and very confused by that direction.
We didn’t even have free local calls so being able to chat with a F/14/California was mind blowing! Funny how many of them there were…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs
Spot the mainframe cabinet and wait for the full wall Moog
(they actually showed non-stop videos back then, it was awesome, nothing like it before)