Juxtapose the magic of a successful ping from the middle of West Africa's
outback with the buzzing of an old serial modem making a connection. Add in
the frenetic flashing of the lights on the cable modem, and the amazement of
connecting to the internet over a device that fits in your pocket. Here's my
take on how it's all worked out: Earlier this afternoon I bought a GSM (mobile
broadband) modem and was able to get onto the Internet for the first time from
a moving car traveling through the wilds of Western Senegal, West Africa. I
was stunned at how far we've come: outside the vehicle windows were a barren
land with neither trees nor water, but I had five bars of connectivity, and was
able to download email. Juxtapose that moment -- a successful ping from the
middle of nowhere -- with a few lazy afternoons poking around old BBS
technology and serial modems (RS-232!) and I'm thinking about just how
different connectivity is after just a few decades, and how lucky I've been to
have been alive for most of it. As I've experienced it, here is how the stages
have played out:
2009 -- Mobile Broadband: You can now buy a USB dongle that works like a
cellphone, and allows you to connect your laptop through your mobile internet
provider from wherever you have a cell phone signal. The GSM modem installs
like a simple USB TTY device (that is, a serial device), and simply relays the
data packets through your cell phone company to the internet. Your phone
already has this modem built in, and your smart phone can access the internet
the same way. On the downside, most of the development community has gone
app-crazy, insisting you must purchase and install an individual application
for just about everything you do. Mostly vanished, from these users' point of
view, is the Internet as a soup of free and easily mixed information. In its
place is an interface consisting of dozens of individual walled gardens, one
paid app at a time: What a philosophical step backward. But communication has
changed too: Lots of people are "done" with email these days, having
long since drowned in it at the office and gotten bored of it back home. Mail
takes too much time, so the bulk of communication takes place on sites like
Facebook (a sentence at a time), or Twitter (140 characters at a time). No
wonder nobody seems to have much to say, can't develop complex thoughts, or
exchange much of anything other than banalities (witness the famous
"Twitter Shitters"). Even this web page is probably too long. Only
the stalwarts still publish a blog these days, as the rest of the world has
decided it's easier to just Tweet and Retweet stuff, 140 characters at a time.
2003 -- present Wireless Broadband: Much like broadband wired internet, the
sudden proliferation of wireless access points, and easily configured hardware
that permitted you to use them, made it easier to connect from coffee shops,
libraries, friends' houses, and more. It also introduced a new attack vector
for baddies who could hack your wireless router and snoop. Turns out, despite
its phenomenal utility, wireless routing is also a somewhat complex thing that
requires knowledgeable and concious configuration, something many homes and
small offices failed to provide.
2000 -- 2009 Broadband Internet: You could now access the internet from your
home far faster than previously, through (A)DSL broadband modems or through a
cable modem, depending on which was cheaper and more convenient in your
neighborhood. The faster connection speed led to more and better information!
Just kidding! It led to heavier, slower, and more complicated web pages,
cumbersome flash menus, bigger graphics, and similar. No one really knew how
to reduce the file size of their digital cameras anymore, so they would send
you 10MB photos of their kids, when 75KB would have conveyed the same image.
Faster speeds also did away with software-on-a-CD, and led to expectations of
being able to download and install software that would have been impossible to
install over dial-up. Gone was the Linux distro on DVD; now you got an install
CD and access to a repository containing the rest. Faster speeds also made
graphics-heavy web forums easier and more fun, and put one of many nails in the
coffin of Usenet text forums. Web searching technology was improving during
this period, and there was a newcomer on the scene: Google, who offered nothing
but search, at the beginning. Increasing connectivity meant users were more
exposed than ever to viruses, trojan horses, and other malware, and
sophisticated exploits allowed Windows XP machines to "XPerience"
life as part of a bot net, sending out more of the same, blasting out spam or
pump-and-dump stock offers. The "always on" phase however also
permitted a break from the chain of desktop office software, as increasingly,
you could use sophisticated online alternatives. Many people discovered the
joy of managing a blog, but then decided soon after either they (a) had nothing
of value to say, or (b) didn't want to take the time to write anything worth
reading.
1995 -- 2000 Dial Up Internet: America Online, later dubbed AOL, best
represented this phase, but before even that the first ISPs were appearing,
offering internet access over dial up connections using Point-to-Point protocol
(PPP). Internet usage was mostly limited to text and simple web pages.
Connect, download your mail into a mail client using the POP3 protocol, hoping
to God some friend with a faster connection didn't send you something that
would take ages to download (this kind of mail turd was often a Powerpoint
presentation of some sort). Given wimpy connections, a lot of effort went into
keeping web pages on the light side -- 45 KB per page was a good target, and
in the absence of context and banner ads, this wasn't too hard to do. You can
now easily download that much information in Javascript now. Most
bricks-and-mortar companies were still figuring out what to do with a website
like www.coke.com once they'd purchased it. Web forums hadn't really been
developed yet (there were some exceptions, like Utne's infamous Café
running software called Motet); but Usenet had millions and millions of
participants (destroying it, as many would assert, changing its character from
a small group of technically savvy and intellectually curious to a sprawling
melee of casual connectors). Web search engines were getting a foothold on
helping web surfers find information, like Altavista and Yahoo! And Gopher,
WAIS, Archie, Veronica, and friends were already ancient history. The age of
Web 2.0 software had not yet arrived, but many tech-minded folks built web
pages (not "blogs"), where they coul provide information or express
themselves. Lots of people learned to enjoy chatting as well, using
competing-but-not-compatible products from Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and others. I have
a strange nostalgia for this period, inexplicable because I updated to a cable
modem the very instant I had one available: the draw is perhaps the fact that
the beeping and buzzing of that 56K modem were the sound of a new world opening
up to me.
1990 -- 1995 Shell Accounts: The Web didn't exist, really, though in
Switzerland, Berners-Lee was developing the technology and the first pages.
But the Internet was alive and well, and students and researchers alike could
access through University-provided shell accounts, typically on a Unix server
linked to the network. Shell accounts got you email and access to multi-player
online games (MUDS), IRC Chat sessions, discussion on a much smaller Usenet
forum, and lots of documents and research, most of which you acquired via FTP
and Telnet sessions. None of this was graphical, really, and the Internet was
still very much the playground of a somewhat technical elite, as you had to
know how to navigate your way around using Telnet, FTP, and the Unix Shell.
Search engines were non-existent for the most part, but you could still use
technologies like WAIS, Archie, and Gopher to search for and retrieve data from
other connected servers, and better university libraries made these services
available to an astonished student body. Computer terminals not connected to
the university backbone could tap in using PLIP and SLIP connections, as
researchers in offsite offices would often lobby to acquire.
Shell accounts still exist, for the Unix hardcore: Panix in New York City
offers shell accounts and Unix services to a hardcore minority that still
relates best to this paradigm of computing.
1980s: Bulletin Board Systems: Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were the mainstay
of early computer networkers long before there was a computer in most houses.
TCP/IP networking was still a ways off for casual consumers, but with an
acoustic modem you could have your home computer dial into a BBS for the price
of the phone call. Instead of expensive Unix servers, these BBS systems were
often home-brewed and ran on home systems from Commodore 64s to BBC Acorns to
TRS 80s and lots of PCs running DOS. What computers in this lovely,
heterogenous ecosystem had in common was serial interface software that
transmitted whatever came over the modem onto the screen. Boom: you were
connected.
There are still BBSes available, mostly over telnet but also over dial up lines
as well. Visit BBSFinder for an up-to-the-minute list of currently
functioning BBS systems, rife with nostalgic folks who still find pleasure in
the intimacy of a small, tech-savvy community. And there are folks actively
developing BBS-type software as well for both server and client sides, like
Qodem and Syncterm, two terminal software packages that recreate the BBS
terminal experience for modern Linux machines.
Final Thoughts: The trend over the past decade has been for faster and more
omnipresent connections. Gone are the days of connecting, then disconnecting,
and doing your work offline. Gone too are the days when accessing the Internet
meant parking it at your desk. Rather, smart phones will soon be responsible
for the majority of connections made to the Internet. And lastly, we've gone
from using the Internet for exchanging text, to exchanging video and music
files, with rich, graphical interfaces and data-intensive protocols. But I
think in the process we've lost something, too.
Gone, for one, is the sense of tight community that BBSes provided, when you
were sharing thoughts with a pool of perhaps hundreds of users. Today's web
forums are used and abused from all over the world, and the sense of intimacy
is somewhat lost, in my opinion. Gone, too, are the freedom and anonymity of
the early days. In the BBS era, you could connect to any bulletin board your
computer could dial, and no intermediaries were necessary. Enter PPP
connections and you needed an ISP to connect through. Yes, you could dial into
your ISP through any number of available phone numbers, but you were now
trackable through an interface. We gave that up for broadband internet, whose
speed required a much more intensive investment in hardware. That edged the
small ISPs out of the market and gave the market for internet connections to an
oligopoly of phone and cable TV providers. Also lost in that transition was
the relative obscurity and freedom of dial up internet: fewer ISPs means fewer
points on which you must exert your control, and that made it easier for
governments to reduce, throttle, censor, and monitor internet users and their
connections.
The nature of the Internet changed as well, as we transitioned from text to
graphics and beyond. On Usenet there were no banner ads, no search engine
optimization, and no user profiles: you chose the user name you wanted and
operated in total anonymity -- by design. The commercialization of the
Internet has led to a concentration of attention on the WWW, and along with it
search engine optimization, Google stat-gaming, and the deprecation of neutral
platforms like FTP and Email in lieu of walled gardens like Facebook and
Twitter (each a service provided by only one company). That final word --
company -- leads to the final flaw: these companies aim to earn profits, and
increasingly the best way to do so is by developing user profiles for each
person that accesses them, in the name of serving them the "perfect
advertisement". Thinking back to the early days of pre-advertising
networking, where privacy and anonymity were still both expected and respected,
it seems we have progressed technically in terms of usability, usefulness, and
aesthetics, at the cost of a significant step backwards in community, privacy,
and humanity. Where to from here?
