[pavlov]

Sometimes it’s just hard to explain something concisely when it’s both rapidly evolving and different from people’s assumptions.

In 1992 it was quite hard to explain what the Internet is. Is it a protocol? Yes, a whole bunch of them actually. Is it yet another email system? Yes, among other things. Is it like a forum? Yes, there’s Usenet, but you can also use that from BBS’s that are not really part of “the Internet”. So do you dial in like on Compuserve? Yes, that’s one way. Does it have games? Yes, but very different ones (tries to explain MUDs).

At that point many a reasonable person has given up with the understanding that it’s some kind of networky thing with a bunch of geeky apps, and you need to be a full-time student to figure it out.

In retrospect it’s easy to think that obviously something like the WWW would come along and clear all this up. I don’t think it was obvious at all in that moment, especially when all the consumer traction was with products like Windows and the VC money was flowing into flashy digital entertainment stuff like CD-ROMs and cable TV walled gardens that were the opposite of the Internet.

[bruce511]

I got onto the Internet in the 1992 you mention at university.

It was easy to describe - a way for humans and computers to communicate. For me it was 99% Newsgroups and FTP. [1]. People shrug and move on. Most don't get it. It's years later that it's commercially available, with software built into the OS (win 95). And then it was using the Web, NNTP and FTP are more-or-less obsolete now.

But the Internet is still the same - a way for humans and computers to communicate with each other.

[1] I downloaded world data via FTP from the CIA, and someone at JPL answered a newsgroup post I wrote. Mind literally blown.

[FFP999]

Perhaps, and yet, I feel like this page still does a particularly bad job of explaining what this thing is. Especially to an audience full of hardcore nerds.

[tudorgirba]

How would you improve on this first paragraph?

"Glamorous Toolkit (GT) is the Moldable Development Environment. Version 1.0 embodies more than 6 years of development and is the result of some 14 years of research. Our goal is to make systems explainable by means of custom tools created for each problem. Glamorous Toolkit makes this possible by making the creation of custom tools inexpensive and seamless."

It introduces a new concept: Moldable Development. And it summarizes succinctly what it's about: creating custom tools for each development problem. Both of these are being exemplified in the article.

What else would have felt better for you?

[stonogo]

I'll take a swing at that first paragraph:

"Glamorous Toolkit (GT) is a mature notebook-style integrated development environment. Our goal is to make systems explainable by means of custom tools created for each problem. Glamorous Toolkit makes the creation of those tools inexpensive and seamless."

Please note I did not mention 'moldable development' because I can't figure out what it is supposed to mean. "Creating custom tools for each development problem" is usually just called "programming". Introducing a new product and trying to define a new concept should happen in separate paragraphs, at the very least.

[dustingetz]

the internet had 7M users in 1992

http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2008.htm

[pavlov]

That’s probably counting everyone who had an SMTP email address and/or Usenet access.

Those were commonly available via BBS’s and (in the case of email) via corporate systems, but it didn’t mean you had any ability to make IP connections yourself.

The first time I paid for dial-up Internet was 1993, I think. It was a very cheap provider. You’d dial to their Unix box with a terminal emulator, like a BBS.

Turned out the price was so cheap because they didn’t allow foreign IP connections at all! I could use IRC and connect to local ftp servers within my small European country, but that was basically it. I knew a bunch of people who were IRC addicts and this kind of local access was perfect for them, but I found it useless.

Did I have Internet access then? Technically I could use all the protocols. In practice it wasn’t really the Internet when connections to other countries just fail. The point I’m trying to make here is that “Internet access” in 1992 meant a lot of different things on a scale that doesn’t exist anymore.