The Early Internet

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision-making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're remembering the early internet. Well, look, let's establish our ages, because I'm a bit older than you guys.

Speaker B: 00:00:31

A bit older than most guys.

Speaker A: 00:00:34

And, you know, the internet was definitely a thing that sort of snuck up and suddenly was somewhere I didn't even know how to type before the internet came along.

Speaker B: 00:00:40

ck to Lady Diana, okay. Yeah,: 1997

Speaker A: 00:00:52

Yeah, she died in August: 1997

Speaker B: 00:01:34

Do you remember what it was about?

Speaker A: 00:01:35

I can't. I can't. I can't. Because what I do remember is we got bored and suddenly started swearing and, and insulting. Trolling, basically. So that is my first memory of, well, not just my first memory, that is the first time I used the internet.

Speaker B: 00:01:49

Yeah, well, Peter, what's your, you know, you're one of these millennials, aren't you? Whereas he's absolute, total gen X.

Speaker C: 00:01:53

So you maintain, I'm cresting 40. So my, my, I, but my, my, my dad was very into computers. So there was always a computer there. The first computer I remember was, it was a Spectrum, which he must've bought. That's kind of the year it came out in nine, in 83, I think. Sounds about right. So there's always been a computer in my life of one kind or another. And so I, my first experiences of the internet were before it, what kind of really was the internet, it was things like AOL online and CompuServe and these sort of, these sort of slightly closed islands that then joined up, become the internet. So, and that must've been when I was in my sort of 10, 11, 12 kind of age. So yeah, I remember these.

Speaker B: 00:02:48

Did your dad get connected?

Speaker C: 00:02:49

Yeah, we, we had connection. I remember, I remember for years using an old dial-up, dial-up modem. Can you put a year on this? If you were about 10, you're 40. Early nineties, I think. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:03:03

Bloody hell. So yeah. That's pretty cutting edge of your dad, I think.

Speaker C: 00:03:07

Yeah, yeah. He's always been into his tech. So yeah, so I remember the, the sort of the soundtrack to my, my youth, the nineties, you're kind of defined by the sound of a, by the sound of a modem. Yeah. By that sound. So yeah.

Speaker B: 00:03:25

What could you do on the internet in the early nineties out of interest? What could you, what things could you do? Were there...

Speaker C: 00:03:31

Well, I, we, I used to, we, I used to play...

Speaker B: 00:03:34

I mean, this is, let's just remind listeners that this is well before things like social media, well before you could, there's no hope of streaming a video. You could just about download an image. You could download images and it took a very long time. And, and, you know, and, and, but there was no, there was no like a Google even.

Speaker C: 00:03:53

No, I remember using things like AltaVista to look stuff up for homework. And so I remember doing a bit of research on the internet, trying to find information that was out there. And this is early nineties. This is early nineties. I remember there were some kind of open, there was definitely library like resources where some libraries had started putting some books.

Speaker B: 00:04:15

Well, I think it started primarily as a kind of academic type thing, didn't it? So, you know, it makes sense.

Speaker C: 00:04:23

So yeah, there were chat rooms and there were news websites and there was email. I remember using email mid nineties.

Speaker A: 00:04:31

Okay. Because I didn't use email until February 98, because I remember I had a hot, I opened up a hot mail account. And also I think rather sort of charmingly, I remember sending one of my first emails and I put a date in the, in, in the, in the body of the email. Yeah, exactly that.

Speaker B: 00:04:46

To whom it may concern. So for me, it was university. So I got to university and Give us a year. Oh, 95. Okay. And they were, you know, there was sort of classes, how to use the internet. And I went along to one of them and set a password, which then was my source of password for everything for the, for the next 10 years. One, two, three, four. Yeah. It wasn't a million miles away from that. And yeah, and that was it really. I remember reading, I read this copy of Wired. Remember, I think Wired is still going. Yeah, tech mag, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And, uh, and, and that was just before I got to university and Wired was full of like, this is the revolution that's coming. We've got, you know, this thing called the internet and here are some cool websites you can look at. And there were things like, there was a website where you could put, um, piercings on a person. Piercings? You could like, you know, a kind of earring on them and stuff. And that was the sort of fun. And, and I did, but I was actually quite scared to use the internet for the first time because I felt like, um, after my entirely private life, now things I was doing were going to be on the internet and that would be a sort of permanent record of my activity. Um, but anyway, I think what we want to talk about. Why do we want to talk about it? Well, well, the question, I mean, everyone's talking about this as being a, you know, technological revolution. And I don't think they're wrong. So I think we want to speculate about what future historians will say about the internet. Okay. And what, you know, what drove it? What are the significant moments and the significant people? And how will, how will, you know, they, what will they ascribe societal changes to the internet? You know, what will happen where they'll go? Well, that's because the internet happened. I mean, in much the same way that we do about the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution. How will people, oh, well, you know, it's quite possible. They'll go, oh, that, remember that internet that people thought that was going to be big, but it turns out it wasn't.

Speaker A: 00:06:48

Fizzled out. Yeah, that's it.

Speaker B: 00:06:50

Until laser sprogs came along. They never caught on, you know. Yeah. So that's it really.

Speaker A: 00:06:55

So what's our point of starting then? Well, I can give you a point of starting. Okay. Because I think it's interesting to, I mean, I think what's interesting is how comparable other stuff is or not, like the industrial revolution, as you mentioned other things, but that might not be the place to start. But yeah, Nick.

Speaker B: 00:07:10

Well, I am going to start there. Okay. As boring and predictable as it is, let's start with the industrial revolution. Now, this is purely my own kind of mapping of what happens. I think we've got four stages in an industrial revolution. And by that, I mean any revolution about the way that things are produced, right? The way that activity happens, the way that value is created, all of that. I think there's four stages, right? So I'm going to go with the first one being creation. So this is the people who essentially invent the technologies that you need for all of the-

Speaker A: 00:07:46

I just want to stop you for a sec, because I think I want to reframe the discussion, because I don't think we're talking about remembering the early internet. I think what we're really talking about is understanding the internet and its place in human history. Well- That's my take on it.

Speaker B: 00:07:59

I think it may be the same thing, because if you want to talk about the industrial revolution, you have to look at the early industrial revolution. And I mean, we're talking about the impact it has on people's lives. And we've just talked about that. What impact did it have on our life? And it's just the sum of all of those impacts, isn't it? Sure. So I don't think- Yeah, fair enough. It's not. So I think you've got this creation phase where people are inventing the technologies and the concepts that you need for all of the other stuff to happen. But those people are not the same people as the people who are involved in stage two, which I think is commercialisation or productisation, where you actually start to change the way industry works. You look at this and you go, I can make money out of this. And that is two things, really. First of all, it's actually changing the way you produce things. But it's also the creation of like a business to business element where you're making the thing into something you can sell. So, you know, first of all, you've got people selling machines, or sorry, you've got people kind of creating machines and using them. Oh, this machine would work well on my farm. But then at some point, you're getting people who are selling machines to other people so they can do the same thing. And you know, if you think about the way that the internet has evolved initially, you might have had people going, you know, this looks like we could do business on the internet. And then other people going, we could sell websites to people. So you've got that kind of support industry grows up where, you know, having a website becomes a key thing. And then you have innovation, right, which is where you create new markets. And then I think, what I call foundation, where you're building a foundation for the next revolution, you kind of mind everything that technology has for you. So if you think about the Industrial Revolution,

Speaker A: 00:09:52

Wait, what? I think, and maybe this, tell me, is this covered under foundation? Or is this coming at a later stage, if we're only talking about the early bit? What about where it just come becomes utterly infused into everything? I think that's the foundation phase, where it's

Speaker B: 00:10:06

was, I think, a new newcomer,: 1712

Speaker A: 00:13:53

what are the key moments? So first of all, Peter, do you agree with, does that work for you?

Speaker C: 00:13:58

I like the Nick Hare epoch model. It's good. I think we can, we can apply that to, to the information revolution. And I think that, yeah, interesting to see where people think we see it. I think I personally, I think we're still, we're kind of fairly early in the innovation stage. I think that all the early stuff has happened, all the basis for it. We've done all the initial creation. Wait, Peter, what more do we need to invent though for the internet? Well, there's still, there's still, there's still, so the impact to society thing is really just, I think, really only just beginning to shake out. So the, the, the, for example, the, the, an innovation that's happened is social media, right? And all the trappings of that. Um, and there's a big sort of societal disquiet about the, this, this, this loss of privacy and loss of control of your information. So the moment you've got the big, the big companies harvesting and hoovering up all your data. But I think, I think that, I think it'll be a sort of societal, uh, reaction to that. And the next innovation will be, will be social media equivalents or alternatives, which are much more privacy focused and a new legislation to protect more data and things. So we have, so GDPR is a good example. Um, that, that is a huge piece of legislation cross cutting that as it is a result of things like Facebook. And it feels a bit like

Speaker B: 00:15:34

the factory apps or something, you know, which said you've got a maximum time you can work per

Speaker C: 00:15:39

day is 10 hours. It's sort of like, yeah. So they've stimulated it's, it's, it's, it's the innovation and the, this, uh, social sort of upheaval has created the driver to have legislation to improve the lives of people who are now sort of either sort of suffering or potentially going to suffer because of this new thing. So yeah, I think it feels to me, it feels like we were very much in

Speaker B: 00:16:02

the sort of innovation stage. Well, I would argue that I think we're a bit further ahead than

Speaker A: 00:16:09

that. Well, look, so that being the case, can we, just as you did with the industrial revolution to help guide us as to where we are, can we pinpoint some of the things that you could say

Speaker B: 00:16:19

NET first, which was the late: 1960

Speaker A: 00:18:35

say: 1990

Speaker C: 00:18:42

really geeky. I reckon it was probably something fairly mundane, like a secondhand car. No.

Speaker B: 00:18:47

It was: 1972

Speaker A: 00:21:13

something, you know, uh, I'm not sure if we've quite established where we think we are at the moment in terms of the development of the internet, but one of the things that really strikes me when you're talking is you were talking about, oh, this happened in, you know, 84, this happened in 91, this happened even quite late up to 95, 96, 97. But I, I think back to what I was doing at that time. Okay. And none of it, I, I didn't, I've never even heard of the internet. I mean, it wasn't a thing. It just was simply not even present in my imagination. Right. Um, and as I said, it was only in 97, then onwards, it started to be a thing. That's right. Now,

Speaker B: 00:21:46

I think there's a 30, well, effectively a 30 year lead in between, you know, the invention of the thing impacting on people's lives. And that's exactly, as I said, it's a similar thing to

Speaker A: 00:21:55

nly, you know, here we are in: 2021

Speaker B: 00:22:06

think back to the last year, you know, like, that would have been impossible to do a podcast

Speaker A: 00:22:11

during COVID and the lockdown. So it's interesting. I feel like a little, you know, I feel like a little cork bobbing along in the ocean. Yeah. And not realising I'm in an ocean. And I don't know, I don't think it's a very good analysis. But, because corks don't think. You're all at sea Yeah, exactly. Look, we're getting close to, we've been going for a while, actually, we need to kind of move this somewhere. We were talking about, we don't really want to talk about what ICP is,

Speaker C: 00:22:34

whatever it was. No, I don't think I need to explain what TCP IP is. I suggest you look it up on Wikipedia. Excellent page describes in detail. You don't know, do you? I do know. I do know. I know as well. So don't tell him. We won't tell him what TCP IP is. Well, in summary, because now Nick's throwing down a gauntlet. Right. The IP bit of the TCP IP is, in summary, is how computers find and address each other on the internet. And the TCP bit is once you have found the thing you are trying to communicate with, how that communication is established

Speaker B: 00:23:07

and maintained. That's right. It's like a chunk of data, isn't it? Where that structure of that data is predefined. And it says, right, first, it's like where you are, where you're trying to

Speaker C: 00:23:17

get this packet of data. It's a standard protocol for arranging bits of information in a way that it'll get the packet there and you'll get a receipt. You'll get an acknowledgement that it either got there or you'll get told what to retransmit essentially. Correct. Anyway, so I think it's worth, I'm keen to give it a bit of a shout out. There are lots of really good YouTubers and bloggers and podcasters who are sort of contemporary historians, who are covering in really great detail, with extremely good research, notable things over the last 20, 30 years. A couple that will come to mind are Nostalgia Nerds. He's a British YouTuber who... I love that guy. He's great, isn't he? Yeah. So he will find something that's sort of interesting or been notable and go into quite a lot of detail about why that thing happened and why that's important. I highly recommend. And then there's 8-Bit Guy, who's much more on the hardware side of things. His thing is restoring old computers, but he's got a wide understanding of the sort of social impact of things as well. So those two together are really good contemporary historians and they'll be excellent resources for future historians in 100 years time, who want to look back and get the detail on things. Let's link to them in the notes as well, on the show notes. We'll make sure that... Yeah, we'll get there. Yeah, definitely. Any others, Nick?

Speaker B: 00:24:50

No, but I was just going to say that I think we've talked about that timeline of how industrial revolutions happen, and there's quite a long lag between the invention and the kind of commercialisation. And I think we are probably all to think about what historians will talk about as the effects, what are the main effects of the internet. You want to talk about that right now? Well, a quick one. Let's do it quickly. Because you know the industrial revolution, if you know this phrase, I don't know if you're much of a history buff, but it had some significant societal effects. Surely not. Now, shift in employment is the first thing. So once you have people working out how to add value with the internet, you get people effectively shifting into industries that are... Yeah, my job would not exist pre-internet. Right. Your job being,

Speaker A: 00:25:44

at the moment, podcaster. Well, but making videos that go online. That's mainly what I do. Right.

Speaker B: 00:25:48

So I think broadcast and mainstream media is one of the industries that has been really demolished by the internet. Anyone could do it now, for example. Even? Yeah. And then you think of things like travel agents, the industry of knowledge storage, you know, being things like, I mean, you know, you could say encyclopedias, but also bookshops and things like that. You know, the idea of physical media, video shops, physical media, storing things, which used to be an industry, it no longer exists really. You know, telecoms, obviously radically changed from essentially phoning each other to, you know, being a means to transmit any information, cartography and mapping, the music industry, massive changes in that. Retail, I think we're at the beginning really of a kind of retail revolution. I mean, I think shops are dead. Yeah. What will Townsend sound like in 50 years from now? When was the last time you went to a shop apart from food shops to buy things? And things like, you know, the hotel and transport industry where, you know, we've moved to a market which is effectively online to, you know, the market for hotels, which used to involve looking in a book, finding a hotel, phoning them up. It's now you just browse and you have, you know, 50 hotels.

Speaker C: 00:27:03

In addition to that, I think it's had extremely deep cutting changes to other traditional industries. So just I'll pick one manufacturing cars, for example, cars, car manufacturing until before the internet was quite globalized. You'd get steel made in one country being turned into parts in another country and then assembled into parts in a third country. But the internet, the ability to send information and share information and communicate in the way we do has allowed that to really explode. And so cars where cars perhaps remain in one or two countries, they're now made in hundreds of countries. Different parts come from all over the place. Parts can get used in multiple different cars. So the microchips that go in the computer of a car are common across hundreds of different types of car. It means you can slice and optimize your supply chain much, much more finely than ever before. And that's just one example. I mean, cars, that the same model applies to everything, you know, making bottled water and making furniture. It's all, the internet has allowed such, it created a huge change in how manufacturing

Speaker A: 00:28:16

altogether works. We need we really need to stop pretty soon. Okay. Are we able to stop? Well, I think we've touched on most of the key points. So okay, I've got I've got two questions. Go. What happens next? Yes. That's my first question. Then I've got a more personal question. What's happening next? What are the big innovations? Well, I think I think people

Speaker B: 00:28:36

are regarding artificial intelligence as probably the next great revolution, the great industrial revolution. And you know, that it really is, you know, impossible to imagine on the scale is now the first artificial intelligence people would have been talking about for nearly 100 years, you know, well, even longer, if you think about, you know, the kind of enabling concepts of sort of, you know, probability, belief, all of those things probably go back three or 400 years. But, but, you know, people are now it's actually possible to implement it. And it wouldn't be if it weren't for the fact that we have things like cloud computing, and, you know, a bit and, you know, big data. So so being able to get hold of lots of data and share lots of data, you know, the creation of data, which is now automatic, but think about people's mobile phones, patterns of life, all of those things, you know, that's essential to be able to use, or to train artificial intelligence in the way that we do. So I would say that's the coming revolution is getting artificial and the effects of that might be hugely profound. But I feel like we have got pretty much as far as we're going to go with the internet. You know, I think we're in, if you take the industrial revolution as a kind of analogy, by the late 19th century, you know, the idea, all of the ideas of the industrial revolution, all of the standardisation and the kind of production line, all of these things have kind of been established. And people are talking about, well, you know, what we can do next. And in the case of that, in the case of industry, it's, you know, telecoms and, you know, the communication revolution. In the case of the internet, I would argue it's probably artificial intelligence. I think the internet has still got

Speaker C: 00:30:19

a ways to go. I agree with you on artificial intelligence, I think that's probably the next big thing. And I think that will, you know, I think it's been described as the last thing we'll ever invent. But the, for better or for worse, but I think the internet still got some ways to go, not least because there are some parts of the world which are still quite not connected. So there's still a lot of people to connect. But also, if you think day to day about your usage of the internet, it's still kind of desk bound. You have your mobile in your pocket, but you're still, it's not ever present. So I think that the next kind of enabling technology will be smart wearables, like with, you know, overlay, the data overlays in your glasses. Internet connected hoodies. Internet connected hoodies, yeah. Smart clothing and things which will, maybe not optically and maybe sort of subconsciously feed you information that help you navigate around the world or tell you or alert you to danger. Things like, will come to become more in the fabric of your, literally in the fabric of your clothes, but the You'll be online in some way all the time. Yeah. Even during sleep.

Speaker B: 00:31:27

Yeah. Sounds horrible. Sounds great. Black mirror style nightmare. It's up to us. It's a brave new world.

Speaker C: 00:31:34

Design it in such a way that it's not.

Speaker B: 00:31:35

Well, there you are. What's your question? What's the other question?

Speaker A: 00:31:38

I don't think we've got time for it and it takes us back a little bit. All right. I was going to ask. We covered everything. Yeah, we have. I was going to ask like a moment where you realised things were different kind of thing. Oh, I think that's not a bad question. Okay. So, what made me think of that a little bit is when you were talking about, hey, you remember when we used to go and get books and things like that. I remember wanting to apply for about 96 maybe. I wanted to go and work in Spain and I was a teacher at the time. And so I went to the library and I got maybe yellow pages for Spain. I don't know what it was. Or yell.com as they became. Right. Remember? Yeah, yeah. And I looked up like schools in Spain from the library. I think I photocopied it and I went through and then I think I telephoned them the ones I couldn't telephone. It wasn't working. I was, I wrote a letter to them. You know, that's what I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's quite a laborious process and it clearly is now it's very different. But anyway, what I wanted to ask is, have you got a moment? Yeah. Where you realise, wow, things are different. And again, just one example, I think I might mention it before in the podcast. I remember about 10, 11 years ago, I was on a business trip. And I was going from Austria to Germany, Austria, and then Turkey. And in Austria, my hotel room got broken into a whole lot of stuff got stolen, amongst which was my BlackBerry. Okay. And I think my laptop as well. And suddenly I had to continue the rest of the business trip without these really means of communication. And it was a nightmare. And I think it made me realise just obviously how dependent I'd become. But also, clearly, business trips existed before the internet. But I was in an internet world without those things. Yeah. And it was really difficult.

Speaker B: 00:33:16

ctually is very late is about: 2010

Speaker C: 00:34:14

eter? So mine, I think it was: 1997

Speaker B: 00:34:39

Whatever happened to Google?

Speaker C: 00:34:41

Yeah, it's just, yeah, they just faded away, didn't they?

Speaker B: 00:34:43

25 years ago, isn't it? It's extraordinary.

Speaker C: 00:34:45

It's sort of a period between: 2005

Speaker B: 00:36:07

Not only can, but expect and must. Because otherwise, you're dead. You could leave a bad review as well.

Speaker A: 00:36:13

Brilliant. Okay, we'll stop there. As always... I really enjoyed that, by the way. It was a bit longer than I would have liked, but I think it was a good one. It was fun to think about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As always, thanks for listening. If you've got any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast.alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed the podcast, Nick, what should you do? Go onto the internet, right? Type in www dot. And smash that like button. Exactly that. Thanks, as always, for listening. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.