Show Entire Article
Andreessen: Right, which could make information so abundant. The future was much easier to see if you were on a college campus. Remember, it was feast or famine in those days. Trying to do dialup was miserable. If you were a trained computer scientist and you put in a tremendous amount of effort, you could do it: You could go get a Netcom account, you could set up your own TCP/IP stack, you could get a 2,400-baud modem. But at the university, you were on the Internet in a way that was actually very modern even by today’s standards. At the time, we had a T3 line — 45 megabits, which is actually still considered broadband. Sure, that was for the entire campus, and it cost them $35,000 a month! But we had an actual broadband experience. And it convinced me that everybody was going to want to be connected, to have that experience for themselves. the notion that everyday consumers would want it over dialup — that was pretty radical.
Andreessen: True. At the time, there were four presumptions made against dialup Internet access, and after Mosaic took off I could see that they were all wrong. The first presumption was that dialup flat-out wouldn’t work.
Anderson: That it would always be too slow, too clunky.
Page 3 of 26 | Prev Page | Next PageShow Entire Article
EMC News & Analysis
DATA IS REAL-TIME EXCEPT NOTED WITH *
* DATA DELAYED AT LEAST 15 MINUTES