On 4/3/2010 01:03, Jeroen van Aart wrote: > Owen DeLong wrote: >> It was thought that we would not have nearly so many people connected >> to the internet. It was expected that most things connecting to the >> internet would be minicomputers and mainframes. > > It took some visionary and creative thinking to "come up" with the > internet. But given such a train of thought the idea of everyone being > connected isn't such a wild idea. I can imagine it'd be almost a given. > > Although if I get the time frame right in those days you had 2 camps, > those (ibm, dec...) who believed that there was no need for home > computers and you only needed a few (hundred?) thousand big mainframes > and minicomputers and those (commodore, apple...) who believed > (rightfully so) there was going to be a big future and demand for home > computers. > > So I guess depending on what "camp" you were in, it's not that strange > to not envision all these household computers being interconnected. > Hindsight is always 20/20. But remember that the internet started as a DoD project with just the military, mil contractors, universities, etc, connected to it. At first it wasn't even envisioned as something the general public would even use. And back in those times having a computer at home was still a fairly unusual thing. Only "geeks" had them (I remember kids poking fun at me back in middle school when they found out I had a home computer). Back then, during the "computer revolution", you used a modem to connect to BBSes, services like Compu$serve, and perhaps the UUCP network for email and usenet. The internet was something only big orgs, corps, universities, and the military had.
So it's not *too* surprising that the "explosion" that happened after the web browser/server came into being was a bit of a surprise for people. And it wasn't all that long after the explosion that I started hearing about things like "IP-NG", etc (for a while I thought IPv6 would use OSI NSAPs hehe). So they got busy addressing the problem pretty quickly, despite having not predicted such a big explosion in internet use. Of course my memory could be a bit foggy, but there are guys on this list who were on the leading edge of all this who could (and probably have) tell the whole story in more detail. :) -Jim
