A Decade Online

Jonathon Mah on 2006-06-18 04:20:12

This year — 2006 — marks my twentieth year of life, and my tenth year online. Having had Internet access for half my life made me reflect on the changes to online technology over the last ten years. Here are my personal notes on the subject. Most of the software discussion is from a Mac perspective. It's far longer than I intended (and took up much more time), but you can skip to any section and skim through.

• WebTV
  • I never used it, but it didn't sound fun.
• The Palace
  • I registered, but must have used it for a few weeks at most.
• AllAdvantage
  • One of the first Mac applications I created was to “automate” this.

This needed two main things to take off: enough users, and SSL. Internet-only companies like eBay made up most of the “first wave”, then existing companies moving online. In the last couple of years it seems like many new online-only companies are starting up again.

Of course, some of the first wave were flops; remember Beenz? PayPal had a bumpy ride to success.

Unlike processor speed, gains in Internet connection speed have been infrequent and discrete, as different transmission lines are pushed to their limits. I started out on a 28.8 Kbps modem, moving to 56 Kbps a couple of years later — PSTN bandwidth was now maxed out. About five years after that we moved to ADSL, until maxing that out and moving to ADSL2+ (24 Mbps) in 2005.

I remember getting my first personal e-mail address from HoTMaiL (as it was then labeled) in 1996. I've used several other mail clients over the years:

• Netscape Mail (part of Netscape 3)
• Eudora
• Netscape Communicator
• Claris Em@iler
  • Fond memories!
• Microsoft Outlook Express
• Microsoft Entourage
• Apple Mail (Mail.app)

Ah, browsers. In 1996 the browser wars were really getting started. Although it seems Netscape 2.0 was released in early 1996, I still used Netscape 1.x for a few months. Even NCSA Mosaic's rendering was still decent back then. Netscape 2 was exciting — seeing frames for the first time put me on a high. Netscape 2 also brought both Java and JavaScript to the party.

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 (Mac)
  • I used this as much as NCSA Mosaic; that is, a few hours.
• Netscape Communicator 4
  • Netscape's golden years. The splash screen is unforgettable.
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and 5 (Mac)
  • The browser wars were won.
• OmniWeb 4
  • Used for a few months. A nice browser, but slow and with rendering issues.
• Mozilla
  • Another few months. Feature-packed, but slow and slightly unstable.
• Safari
  • This served me well for a while. It has some wacky features (the bookmark system and “snap-back”), but not a good extension system.
• Firefox
  • My browser for several years. It's less responsive than Safari, but faster overall with my extensions

My first source of Mac software was #Macfilez on EFNet (IRC) — slow DCC transfers over dial-up. In the Mac world, I'm sure many people remember the rise of Hotline (late 1990s) and the move to Carracho (early 2000s). For music sharing, Napster was king. Audiogalaxy was fun too, but after these died off it became an ugly mixture of LimeWire/Gnutella and KaZaA, which were increasingly poisoned, and eDonkey, with its long queues. Since 2004 BitTorrent has been the main distribution channel.

As far as I'm aware, Usenet has always been popular for binaries (alt.binaries.*), but I've never been into it.

The hype and promise of streaming video has been around since the beginning. RealAudio Player 3 was released in 1996, with RealPlayer (with video) coming soon after. Online video didn't take off until the last year or two, with a combination of:

• Video support in Macromedia Flash 6 (2002)
  • RealPlayer had a very bad reputation, and it's looked at with suspicion.
  • It took another year for enough users to install the plug-in.
• Broadband
  • Acceptable video takes 200–300 Kbps. This has only become widespread enough in the past two to three years — widespread enough for media companies to get interested.
• Existing content
  • Media companies put their existing content on the 'Net
  • This gains mild interest, and these companies use their existing channels (TV, etc.) to publicize online video.
• User content
  • YouTube (2005) was a huge turning point in online video. Users can upload videos, and others can easily watch them with no waiting. Perhaps YouTube is to online video as Geocities was to web pages.
  • Google Video jumped on the bandwagon. “Download to iPod” is the coolest feature.

Video conferencing has always had a lot of hype: CU-SeeMe; video over IRC; iChat AV. I haven't understood the appeal — it's too synchronous compared to the rest of the Internet. It still hasn't caught on.

The “always-on” dream is getting closer. Intermittent dial-up connections were mainstream until the early 2000s, when ADSL and cable became commonplace. In the mid 2000s, WiFi has become almost ubiquitous — not only are networks always connected to the Internet, but computers are always connected to the networks. (Well, not quite yet, but far more so than before.) Always-on brings new possibilities like RSS and desktop weather displays.

The mid-1990s was the age of the web development n00bs, and Geocities let us be proud. I've been wracking my brain; I think I had a page in TimesSquare, and one in Hollywood. We committed such crimes as animated GIFs (in general), animated dividers, “seamless” backgrounds, and Java applet buttons. Everything was so slow anyway, we didn't care waiting another 20 seconds for our Java buttons to appear in succession.

From 2000, the combination of PHP, Apache, and MySQL matured enough to allow amateur users to set up their own blogs, with the help of Movable Type and friends. The focus of dynamic development has since shifted from servers to clients, with the help of Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005) — that is, AJAX.

IM is still a mess of protocols, separated mostly by region. From personal observation:

• MSN Messenger, in Australia
• AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), in the US
  • Also common amongst Mac users, with iChat
• ICQ, in Germany (now merged with AIM)
• Jabber amongst FOSS enthusiasts
• Yahoo! Messenger, nowhere

Web-based Java chats have died off too.

• IRC
  • I used IRC until about 1998, when IM gradually took over my chatting needs.
• Usenet
  • I've never been a user of Usenet newsgroups. I suppose e-mail mailing lists have sufficed.
• RSS
  • RSS has never appealed to me. It must be because I'm not as much of an “information whore” as some. I do use RSS regularly for podcast feeds.