10 years:
It’s the 10-year anniversary of the mass consumer take-off of our networked world. The six months to Christmas 1995 saw it all come together: affordable early 486 PCs; a half-decent new operating system called (shudder) Windows 95; a newly-released Netscape 1.2 web browser; and treacle-like 14.4-baud modem access to the fledgling web. Now Dell sell £499 laptops that would have been judged ‘supercomputers’ in ’95, and Tesco and Richard Branson compete to offer us free net access. What a ride it’s been. And it’s not over yet, although I doubt we’ll see Kurzweil’s semi-mystical “singularity” appearing anytime soon (i.e.: “technological change so rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history” (heralding) “the advent of a superhuman intelligence” – Wikipedia). I’ll settle for the English-language Wikipedia DVD-set by Christmas ’05 – that really would class as ‘superhuman’.
10 years of the mass net
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by D’log :: blogging non-stop since 2000 » Pod people
07 Jul 2006 at 08:41
[…] Another new UK survey. It’s the result of “more than 1,300 online interviews” by a marketing consultancy, and has been released to the Mail during the press ’silly season’. So, on a number of counts, the Tech Tribe Report is more than a little dubious. But it’s an interesting, if fairly predicatable and shallow, insight into the generation that has grown up without much knowledge about how things were done in the old pre-1995 ‘unwired world’… “Britain’s young people [16-25] are for the first time spending more time looking at internet sites than watching TV” … “The average youth spends 23 hours a week online and 67 per cent of youngsters say they would be ‘lost’ without their PC.” … “Nearly half want to launch their own business and only a third want to work for a big company” … “Eighty per cent expect to marry and the same percentage expect to have children.” … “More than 90 percent want to own their own home” … and they “They reject traditional politics and have no faith in politicians.” […]