[Old Sarge]

Pictures of cats.
Porn.
Photos of dinner plates.
Porn.
Stupid teen girls making faces.
Porn.
Tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories.
Porn.

[Mr. K]

i wonder what the firs message was ?

[Kartographer]

World Wide Web??? Where can I print it out so I can read it tonight? ;-)

[ShadowAce]

[chrisser]

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be on the early Internet in college, when it was still just text based messaging and almost nothing else.

I would have a hard time giving it up, and envy the kids today growing up with this vast resource. I believe I have learned more on the web than all my schooling combined, including my college work. Most of it is practical knowledge, but I have also pursued areas of personal interest for knowledge’s sake, and done some refreshing of subjects I had forgotten.

I seldom set foot in a store or bank anymore, and I save a bunch of money. And then there’s the access to music and other media. Just amazing from the days growing up with 3 channels on a black and white TV and am/fm radio.

It can be abused/wasted like any tool, but if you take advantage of it with reasonable care, it can really enrich your life.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Thank you, Mr. Gore. Your invention enables me to get the real news instead of leftist propaganda.

[greene66]

I remember hearing over and over about the internet breaking the monopoly of the liberal media and the news, and ushering in an opening for a wave of conservatism. Yet, after all these intervening years, I’ve only seen America sink further and further into the muck of socialist statism, and the supposedly ‘more savvy’ younger, internet generations become more and more like brainwashed drones.

Oh, well. I was pretty late to the internet myself (1998). Used to see it much more positively than negatively, at first. Not so sure anymore. It’s certainly led me to have a much, much lower opinion of the American populace than I did beforehand. Lately I’ve actually started toying with the idea of just cutting the internet cord altogether, and excising it entirely from my life. Just as had done many years back with modern tv/pop-culture, and now find myself slowly doing with the news/politics realm as well.

[catnipman]

The first packet network was ARPAnet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Shutdown_and_legacy

Then came NSFnet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Network#Privatization_and_a_new_network_architecture

And then the forced transition of the NSFnet by NSF Program Manager Steven Wolf from a privately operated (and NSF funded) communications network to one which used commercial links in 1995. It was this last transition from the public to the private sector when the commercial Internet was born, fulfilling the vision held by Steven Wolf when he terminated the direct NSF funding for the original NSFnet and instead provided funding to the NSFnet participants that could be used only to connect each other with a new, private network that eventually became the public Internet that we know and love today, and which was started with this seed money.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented a foundational information access and display protocol named called the World Wide Web and which is one of the main protocols that rides on today’s Internet, but WWW is NOT the Internet and would be useless without an actual Internet that uses packet switching protocols and equipment first built and put into practice by DARPA and then by the NSF along with their many commercial partners who built the actual equipment and wrote the actual software, partners that I might add that eventually morphed into the mighty Cisco and others.

I know these things because I was involved with the inception and demise of the NSFnet and subsequent experimental high-speed networks used to interconnect the former NSFnet participants.

[Fedupwithit]

"Oooooooo...they have the Internet on Computers now!!'

-Homer Simpson

[SkyPilot]

ARPANet Computer.

[KosmicKitty]

1990 + 25 = 2015, not 2014

Just saying

[tubebender]

I signed up for eBay in 1998, does that make me a old timer. My first computer was a Mac clone from Sears and Roebuck and I remember the agony of Dial-up with Comp u Serve it think and then came Netscape from Mark Andreasen.

[Starstruck]

I was on it back when the informational super highway was just a gravel road. Being an impatient and curious fellow I can’t go back to having to wait to get information. If only I could tap into the NSA:)