[venomsnake]

Cheap IBM PC clones make possible having a lot more computing devices in every home, which allowed the dot com boom in the late 90's.

The clones were possible because IBM due to various business, legal and other stuff could not stamp them down. So we got to the point where computing penetration was fast and high enough for the whole net thing to make sense.

[hollerith]

Well, OK, I guess.

I just hope people realize that the Internet was the most compelling and most popular way to "get online" even before there were significant numbers of PC clones on the Internet.

Specifically, although it was technically possible to give a Windows machine a direct TCP/IP connection to the Internet, if you were using a PC clone to access the internet before July 1993, you were probably using the PC clone to run a terminal-emulation program (e.g., Kermit) to log in to a Unix shell account.

(I chose July 1993 as the date by the way because that was the month in which the New Yorker ran the cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," which was the first reference to the Internet in a mainstream publication that seemed to arouse the interest or the curiosity of large numbers of readers.)

[scholia]

Actually, the most popular way for ordinary (non-academic) users to get online was through services such as CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. The web thing and Windows really took off after the widely-publicized launch of Windows 95, which came shortly after the widely-publicized Netscape IPO.

[hollerith]

The Internet had more non-academic users in July 1993 than CompuServe, AOL or Prodigy. Most of those non-academic users connected "through work" (either at work or by dialing in to a pool of modems maintained by their employer).

If you remove people who connected through work from the definition of ordinary users, then AOL or Compuserve might have had more ordinary users than the Internet, but not vastly more. There were at least a dozen ISPs offering shell-account-style access to the internet in July 1993, Netcom, Best, Panix and The World being big US-based ones.

[scholia]

Depends how you define "internet users". You're certainly right if you think of email and FTP. However, online services were more widely used by ordinary Americans until they got web access ... and an awful lot of them got their first web access via AOL.

You may recall the huge impact that AOL had when it connected to the web. AOL also bought Netscape, which had been a dominant force in the early commercialization of the web (along with Windows 95), before taking over Time-Warner.

[hollerith]

There's a reason I put a date in my sentences. Yes, a lot of Americans got their first web access via AOL, but I would be shocked to learn that it was possible to browse the web via AOL in July 1993. I did not succeed in my attempt just now to find out when it became possible, but consider that AOL did not provide its users with access to Usenet until September 1993.

And consider that that in July 1993 Usenet was still much bigger and more important than the web. The web grew very quickly, but it takes a while to grow from zero users. (To help jog people's memories: Netscape Communications -- as "Mosaic Communications Corporation" -- was not founded till April 1994. Altavista opened to the public in December 1995.)

We've gone very far from the topic of this comment section.