[smacktoward]

With the important difference that getting on the early Internet only required a telephone line, which everybody already had, and a modem, an inexpensive piece of hardware you did not have to physically strap onto your face.

[sbarre]

No it also required a computer, which a lot of people did not have back in the mid-90s, and not everyone was prepared to shell out the money to get one (it was certainly not "inexpensive" if you were buying one for the sole purpose of getting online).

My source on this? I worked at one of the first consumer ISPs in Canada, and we regularly had people coming in to sign up because they heard about "this Internet thing" but did not have a computer.

Most people thought we provided one with the service, and some people just didn't understand that you accessed the Internet through a computer.

[smacktoward]

I left that out because VR also requires an expensive computer -- expensive at least compared to what most people have. Rift, for instance, requires not just a discrete GPU but a pretty serious one (GTX 970/1060 level), in a market where only about a third of PCs sold at retail in 2016 had a discrete GPU at all (see http://www.anandtech.com/show/10864/discrete-desktop-gpu-mar...).

So, if by "VR" you mean Vive/Rift-level VR, very few people will have a computer already lying around the house that can cut the mustard, even if they bought that computer relatively recently.

[plokiju]

Buying a VR headset and a new gaing computer today is still significantly cheaper than buying a home computer in the 90's for the early internet

https://pifflelab.com/2012/07/22/computers-the-1990s-you-pai...

[sbarre]

I was not disputing your point that VR is expensive to get into (I own a Vive), but rather that getting online in the 90s was not expensive.

[avaer]

It also required ridiculous metered long distance fees, forced you to lock up the family telephone line, and buying and installing a modem was much harder without the help of the internet.

I would advance the hypothesis that the prospect of the internet back then seemed much worse compared to dropping a few hundred to have Vive hardware shipped to your door and plugging it in. But the people who built the internet saw what it could be, not the garbage that it was.

And we're still in the beta stages; this stuff only gets better with time.

[Pica_soO]

Lets not forget ruining two perfectly fine rubber plunger, if you did it DIY.