The Internet, 20 years later: Party like it’s 1994

Around this time this week, twenty years ago, I connected to the “real Internet”, using a borrowed 9,600 bps modem.

There is one word to describe the experience: Slow.

It wasn’t just the already obsolete modem’s speed, but also the national pipeline’s available bandwidth, a T1 pipe to Pipex UK connecting Greece to the rest of the world.

Things have changed in leaps and bounds since, and today we take for granted everything we can achieve in seconds or less on the Internet.

In 1994 there was no serious search engine to peruse, other than Yahoo, and one could actually create a catalog of existing web sites and publish it. At the time, I worked for a publisher that every month printed “The World of Internet” and sold it as a stand alone 64 page magazine.

For the most part, countering this sluggishness of painfully slow speeds, one had to resort to connecting to BBS systems, in order to access local news, information and chat. The “real Internet” was a secondary choice, a segmented reality that offered little interest, due to its narrow pipeline. Things changed over time, and by 1996 we were rocking 33,600 bps modems and the pipeline had received multiple upgrades of bandwidth.

Since its commercial birth two decades ago, the Internet expanded due to technological progress, the pledge of the US government to keep it tax-free and unregulated, and good old plain Capitalism.

And yet, 20 years later, there are people out there that by donning blinders question the motives of domain investors, calling them “squatters” and other less appealing epithets. There is no excuse for such display of ignorance in 2014.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets to live during an era of creation, experiencing the Internet’s transformation from a basic quasi-educational / military network, to a global Net that serves as an extension of one’s minute-to-minute life.