Saw this on Netflix last night.
At the 1 hr 5 min mark, the nerd Roland has a project titled: Total Access To All Knowledge Through Computers with a global network map. While the boy gets the girl, Roland got stinking rich.
[deleted]
Basically, he could sue Al Gore for claiming to have invented the internet. If only Roland was a real person.
shareNah, nice thought on his part, but the idea that there will one day be this giant interconnected thing called the "Internet"? Come on. It'll never catch on.
shareDon't know what you guys are talking about. I was on the Internet in 1986. We got connected to it between 1984 and 1985, in fact.
Of course, back then you basically had to have a university sponsor you because ARPANET was providing the main connectivity. And you couldn't do business over the Internet. Supposedly. At least until 1995 when the World Wide Web was born.
We even had Digital Equipment Corporation send us VMS patches over the Internet - albeit using ftp and kermit.
So yeah - it was around then and not that far fetched.
Yep, many Australian universities were running academic "internets" in 1983, if not earlier, and the U.K. had been running Janet (Joint Academic Net) since the 1970s.
In fact, there are some quite good arguments for the claim that the UK invented the "internet," although it depends on how you define it. At least the UK got indisputable cred for the WWW!
____
"If you ain't a marine then you ain't *beep*
Well, a form of the internet has been around since the '60s, but clearly what they were talking about was *mainstream* internet, which really didn't catch on until the turn of the millenium (or so).
shareIt didn't "catch on" perhaps, but it was there and many people were already using it. The WWW came about in the 90s. Stuff like e-mail, message boards in the form of BBS, chat rooms in the form of IRC, and file sharing in the form of FTP, were around long before that. For example, google has archived star wars discussion on usenet (http://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/net.movies.sw) contemporary with the release of ROTJ. The turn of the millennium was just a critical mass point of mainstream adoption.
shareI am watching the movie now and just noticed that. I had to rewind and snap a screen shot to confirm what I saw.
I got equally excited by the reveal. Lo and behold, who would have thunk.
Of course, the idea of the internet was around since circa 1960s, as mentioned ARPNET. And even in 1985, it was possible to order a pizza home deliver online via CompuServ -- remember them? A more affluent classmate demonstrated such using is then Commodore 64 and modem.
Keep in mind the movie "War Games", which came out about the same time, is premised upon there existing some computer network which allowed some teen to access the Pentagon computer via his home computer.
I was using the Internet in 1986 though the university CS department. You weren't allowed to use it for commercial purposes at that time. Quantum Link in 1985 was the first commercial social network I remember. That's back when we paid by the minute.
sharei had used it in 1994 at school in the 8th grade in computer class..but didn't have a home computer until 1996...been an internet addict ever since
it sure has changed over the years I gotta say
good catch on seeing that in the movie, had not noticed
The Internet existed at least since the early 70s with the development of TCP/IP.
The world wide web did not exist until at least the early 90s, with the development of http.
So Roland's kind of ahead and behind the curve, but in a great position to be one of the leaders in making the global network common and universally accessible.
What about the Classic "Weird Science"?, the sci-fi fantasy film was chock full of SPFX Driven Internet scenes. Wyatt hooking into The Military's Network through his Phone handset Modem, them "Surfing" the Network until they found the right access port...the "Internet" was portrayed by a dozen different films in the early 80's...Hollywood knew it was coming, just not how exactly.
Wake up, Time to DIE.