Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]

It's amazing just how quickly you can catch the under estimation of the internet's potential. Within the first sentence, starting with the word "imagine", the largest image that could be conjured is related to viewing content created offline, rather than creating and sharing it within the internet itself. In the furthest stretches of the imagination, the prediction still falls very short. No criticism to anyone in 1994, it's just fascinating how difficult it is to peer far into the future.

Kind of makes me wonder what would those people say if we played them Bo Burnham&#x27;s Welcome to The Internet from 2021: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU</a>

Wow, the phrase &quot;information superhighway&quot; really brought me back. I hadn&#x27;t heard that for quite some time!

1. This brought me back. When she clicked into the &quot;mall&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;ve been intense pressure from 1800flowers.com!<p>2. We still can&#x27;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 &quot;Defiant Jazz,&quot; featured in Severance, also on its own platform).<p>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 &quot;telephone poll&quot; phase straight to cell towers.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19990208003609&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;branch.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19990208003609&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;branch.com...</a>

When I pause Netflix, why dont I have the option to purchase the clothes they are wearing on screen?

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&#x27;t have POTS lines anymore).

I realize I&#x27;m going way against the grain of other commenters, but this video has made me aware of how little progress has actually been made since then. I mean, the core ideas of the modern internet services we&#x27;re relying on were already there back in 1994.<p>Aside from much slicker devices, much higher bandwidth, much broader reach and a few new things around the edges, how much change have we actually seen? I&#x27;m of course being a bit facetious - speed, convenience, reach are all very important. But when it comes right down to core &quot;mind blowing&quot; new tech, how much have we actually improved on 1994?

World Wide Web (or WWW) is too long to say and &quot;The Web&quot; 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&#x27;t come up with one yet, I guess we will just have to live with the WWW being called the Internet.

Related are the AT&amp;T &quot;You will&quot; commercials.<p><pre><code> https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=a2EgfkhC1eo</code></pre>

Funny to see the BBC complaining about &quot;letting the market forces&quot; build the internet. The said market forces didn&#x27;t do too bad.

Anyone else pained by the fact that it&#x27;s 28 years later and we <i>STILL</i> don&#x27;t have fiber deployed widely? My parents are paying $65 &#x2F; mo for 5mb dsl, and it&#x27;s the best option they can get a stones throw outside of the city limits. Pathetic when you compare it to municipal broadband deployed everywhere with powerlines like in Chattanooga, TN

I like the not so subtle dig at John Major&#x27;s total lack of policy regarding the internet in 1994.

Disappointed to not find a flower shop at branch.com:1080

this is my favorite: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A</a>

Wow this episode was a goldmine for anyone back then listening hard enough. In this little episode she told you to make:<p>winamp youtube amazon spotify<p>Also back then the Apple Newton had already been created and shipped. Also NeXT.

I miss programmes like Tomorrow’s World.

Related?<p>Ed Krol&#x27;s <i>The Whole Internet</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;wholeinternetuse00krol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;wholeinternetuse00krol</a>

I watched this live when it first aired. My Miracom 9600 being my gateway drug to Usenet, Gopher, IRC, and the warez scene I was a part of.<p>How far we have come. The future will be interesting and exciting, if we can get past this current hump of monolithic &quot;controlled experiences&quot; that Facebook&#x2F;Meta&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;etc want to push on us.

For some reason this made me flashback to the summer of 1981 when MTV first went on the air<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs</a><p>Spot the mainframe cabinet and wait for the full wall Moog<p>(they actually showed non-stop videos back then, it was awesome, nothing like it before)

Say it again!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgflip.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;6ug8by" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgflip.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;6ug8by</a>

Here is one of my favorite videos from the early days of the web. Two popular morning television hosts discuss the at-symbol and ask &quot;what is internet, anyway?&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg</a>

Around that time is it the plan to move to iso&#x2F;osi 7 level. Is there migration to that? Is a chairman of a little known committee called ietf …<p>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.

Something I&#x27;d have prefered about URL&#x27;s is a numbering system instead of superdomains, that would allow allocating different sites at the same domain name. For example:<p>* amazon.1 is the index of sites<p>* amazon.123 is Amazon Inc.<p>* amazon.878 is some roof installation company<p>* amazon.111 is a courthouse in Brazil

The answer is no. We were not ready for the internet. Its made people crazy.

Maybe it&#x27;s nostalgia, but there&#x27;s something calming about CRTs...

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

The irony of watching this on my high speed fiber based internet connection while the host talks about the future where one can watch high quality video on high speed fiber connections.<p>The future is now!

i liked her light dig at the british govt for not having a modem or a policy on the internet. funny how different it is now with all the european regulation of the internet.

Interesting that the copper wires stuck around, UK&#x27;s fibre optic rollout still ongoing not to be completed til 2026 or later

Port explicitly specified in at least one URL. Was HTTP without a standard port back in &#x27;94?

“Recipes” - it’s always, always there in these kind of things, and makes me laugh every time.

They were not, in fact, ready.

All the websites shown probably implemented way better than most modern ones?

curious how most of the services present nowadays in Internet were already planned in 1994...makes you think where is the innovation?

personal information in professionally produced video before the first minute is out. it&#x27;s not even the anchor, probably just staff.

Is there anything like Tomorrow’s World today?

Narrator: &quot;They weren&#x27;t&quot;

It&#x27;ll never catch on.

well, 28 years after airing of this report, most UK &amp; 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.