[pygy_]

Bowie: I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society—both good and bad—is unimaginable. I think we're on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.

Interviewer: It's just a tool, though, isn't it?

Bowie: No, it's not... no, it's an alien life form [laughs]. It's just arrived from Mars.

1998?

[jccc]

I very much doubt that he thought the Internet was invented by Gore in 1997. Expand your time scale to the level of the point he's making, and yes it did just arrive.

[pygy_]

I was not faulting him for possibly not knowing the full history of the internet.

Pre-1997, the internet and the web were both very confidential. It started to become a thing in the public mind around that time, and seeing it, in 2000 (apparently the proper date of the interview) as an alien life form is very insightful.

[tremon]

I don't think that timescale is correct, at least for my youth (in The Netherlands). 1997 was about the year that we started to get always-on Internet access at home (with cable and adsl). Dial-up was already well-established by then.

Me and my classmates were well-aware of the Internet before that. I remember browsing for FastTracker 2 samples my second year in highschool (1995 that must've been).

[zbyte64]

TIL I had access to confidential records when browsing the internet on windows 3.11

[asveikau]

I don't disagree that characterizing it as an "alien" would not have been out of place at the time.

However, it was not "confidential" in 1996. That is simply a ridiculous statement.

[aaroninsf]

It's only ridiculous if you willfully overlooking the context of the interview... which is not history of arpanet 101.

From the perspective of the Time magazine reading consumer middle class, yes, the internet just arrived fully formed, with only Compuserve and its ilk as hobbyist forerunners with hardly more uptake than CB or ham radio.

[pygy_]

s/confidential/not broadly known/ ?

I'm a tech head (learned programming in elementary school in the 80's) that grew up in a non technical family, and I discovered the internet, as most people, around 1996, when the TV news started talking about "the information highways".

[abannin]

'Just' is not in reference to a time frame. This statement is more in the feel of 'it just came from nowhere'.

[psykovsky]

2000, in fact.