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In mid-1993, two things happened. CERN made access to the World Wide Web free, thus opening the way for everything that came after, and Mosaic was released. Thus, the WWW started. Yeah, the Internet was already functioning with newsgroups, gopher, etc., but most people didn't know the Internet existed until the WWW was opened up to public use.
I didn't have a PC until 2003, I knew people who had computers in the 1980s, back then "dial-up" meant dialing a number on a touch tone phone and putting the hand set on a modem.
I would say the internet as it is today can be traced to when Google bought YouTube or when Facebook passed myspace in number of users.
I think the real question the OT is asking is, "Is the internet today more like the internet of 2017 or 2011?" The answer of course is please delete this thread!
I would say around 1990-91....but because that's when BITNET was, that's when the bulletin boards were, that's when the FTP's started coming on line.
All the things that weren't really that academic but very fun to play with. BITNET relay, talking to people everywhere. FTP's, able to see files and especially pictures from around the world. Bulletin Boards where one got to look onto the privacy in another part of the world.......if you did it "right".
True, it wasn't Internet, even in the early days..................but it was something very fun and made us eager to accept so much more.
I would say not until the early 2000s. It was definitely widely known from 1995 on, but still quite mysterious to many people for several years beyond that. 1994 was probably the last year most people in America hadn't even heard of the Internet, or only knew it vaguely as some "information superhighway" that researchers and nerds used. In the late 90s it was exploding but many people still didn't use it.
Aside from in America, Canada, Australia and a couple other countries most Westerners did not go online until the early to mid 2000s and even those who did used it mostly for email and generally no longer than a half hour a few times a week.
In the developing world the Internet wasn't widely used until after 2003 I would say and even today many still don't use it. Cell phones are common just about everywhere now though.
1993 when the world wide web invented Tim Berners-Lee came about. I have a degree in computer science and was working at it before and after.
The web was actually first thought of in the 80s, the basic design on paper in early 1989 and the actual code in late 1990. And Berners-Lee had a program called ENQUIRE dating back to 1980 which formed the basis of his later much more successful project so in a way you could argue he started creating the Web all the way back then.
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