Monday, February 7, 2011

What Is The Internet?



Update: I just learned that an NBC production assistant was fired for posting this video to YouTube.

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This is pretty amusing. Today Show hosts Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel trying to figure out what cyberspace is back in January 1994. "What is the Internet anyway?" he asks.

As someone who has been plugged in since 1989, first on AOL, then with a dial-up account on Lakeville Internet, I find it almost shocking that, even at that relatively early date, some high-profile journos needed to ask the question: "What does the @ sign mean?"

Didn't NBC have email back then?

5 comments:

  1. this IS amusing, just because i grew up in this age. when this aired, i was making my own website with crude un-compliant HTML. When I was 12, I nearly plagiarized a report on the state of Montana from stuff i downloaded from Prodigy on-line (who checked the internet for school reports back then? But my conscience got the best of me.)

    How times have changed.

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  2. Got my first address with @ sign in 1989, too.

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  3. It does work. Sometimes I go a year without checking it and they still haven't deleted the account in all these years.

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  4. My understanding is that email addresses exist forever ... Hmmmmmm????

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