Clip from January 1994 on the Today show about the "Internet"

KathyGee

http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/31/today-flashback-katie-couric-whats-an-internet/?hpt=C2

I love this clip... it's amazing to me to even go back to a time when all of this needed to be explained.

 For the record, and because you know I'm old AND dorky, I started working on the "internet" in 1992, when I went to grad school at Renssalear, one of very few schools in the country that had access to it. We had to use Sun workstations to access it.  I remember having a course my first semester in IT where we learned about the "World Wide Web" (said with an intranslatably heavy Indian accent -- all I heard was the Wulda Wida Webba" and still didn't understand.   We had homework assignments on how to find things through Mosaic.  Most of everything we know today didn't exist (google, yahoo, etc) so you had to go through Mosaic (the first real user-friendly browser). 

And I did have an e-mail address, but the only people who could e-mail me were other students in my class, since no one else had the internet yet. 

At that time, it is estimated that there were about 10,000,000 users on the internet. 

Today, there are about 2billion.  200 times that amount from 20 years ago.

 

SSM&JLM

My mom has been on the internet for a while b/c she worked in computers.  I remember when we got our first computer, an apple 2c+ and then got AOL and thought we were big time.

shelley1002

I started using the internet when I started college in fall of 1994.  We had a computer lab because most students didn't have their own computer.  I remember the email was through telnet and there was a way to IM with it too.  I remember using yahoo to search for stuff but there wasn't much out there and it was so slow.

LindsayM

Wow. That is just wild. I was in 4th grade at the time this aired and I remember already chatting away on AIM by 6th grade.

Thanks for posting this - so interesting!

Mitzzi23

How far we've come in 16 years.  My grandpa is 97 and to think of all of the changes he has seen in his life is so interesting to me.  We try to explain voicemail to him and he just doesn't get it.