Many of you do not remember the days before the Internet was always on and always with us. However, people did communicate electronically before the Internet but it was done with proprietary systems that had limited access. I worked for Apple in the eighties. At the time we communicated with a computer via modem to the mainframe. We ran a terminal session on the mainframe to get our mail.
We eventually migrated to a sophisticated mainframe communications system called AppleLink. It had a wonderful graphical user interface and some great features like the ability to unsend an email. However, you had to have some connection to Apple to have an account. There was no communicating with other companies or people. You also connected to it with a modem. There were places all over the country where we could dial in with a local phone call.
The first services that allowed noncorporate people to communicate were Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). A BBS is a computer server running software that allowed users to connect. My children who are in their forties began their online lives in AOL chat rooms and with BBSs.
Around 1993 Apple first started making use of the Internet. First, it was just a bridge from AppleLink and then we moved to pure Internet mail. I even used Eudora for a while. One of Apple's current Mac product managers worked for me at that time as a system engineer. He was convinced to move to Blacksburg because we were able to get him two Ethernet connections to the Internet in his Blacksburg apartment. It was something that he could not get even in Cupertino at the time.
However, most of us were stuck with modems at the time. When I built my home office, I put three phone lines in it. One was only used for a modem. For a while, I used just modems which got faster over time, then we moved to a dual system that had a line of sight antenna on the roof to Tinker Mountain with a coax cable/modem for downloads and was paired with a phone line and a standard modem for uploads. Then I went to DSL via phone line and a cable modem with Internet connectivity in our Roanoke home. While I had both for a while, neither was very reliable or fast. Eventually, cable modems improved much more than DSL and I dropped my DSL line. The cable modem was still a hassle with a period of two or three months once until we found where the copper line had corroded.
Getting the Internet through a cable modem still was not a complete solution. We were lucky. Early on we had networked the house with Apple's LocalTalk cabling so everyone could print. Not long after getting on the Internet, we switched out our wiring for Ethernet. Wireless home networking was not introduced by Apple until July 1999 when they rolled out Airport cards and the Airport base station.
Getting to the Internet when traveling also presented a lot of problems before wireless became pervasive. Until 1991 when Apple introduced its first laptops, we lugged some pretty heavy computers like the original Macs into hotel rooms just to get our mail. I had a Mac SE/30 that I used for a couple of years. With its keyboard, an external modem, and carrying case, it weighed over 20 pounds. Fortunately, laptops, in Apple's case the Powerbooks, that were lighter and better for travel came along just about when the Internet started getting really popular.
Probably the most interesting product that I ever accessed the Internet with was a Newton 2000 (pictured at the top). I was using a Newton when Steve Jobs announced the first iMacs which were marketed as being the easiest computer to connect to the Internet. That's its internal modem card pictured at the bottom left.
In 2013. when I wrote an article for ReadWrite Web about how slow and expensive US Internet connectivity was, my Internet cable modem connection was 22.51 Mbps down and 5.26 Mbps up. In 2020, I had 481 Mbps down and 22.8 Mbps up. That is a download to upload ratio of twenty-one to one. Cable companies assume that I want to download more stuff than I want to upload. That is often not the case with someone like me who works from home and handles a lot of large files.
I still do not have the kind of connectivity that I need to do everything that I would like from home via the Internet. My connectivity has struggled to keep up with my business needs. Obviously, it is a lot easier to get on the Internet with Smartphones, WiFi, and easier to set up cable modems. It is still not plug-and-play as we all dreamed about years ago. However, we are getting a lot closer. My next move will be to a fiber neighborhood (a Fiberhood), I might just get to see the future and just plug an Ethernet cable in to be connected.
Update: 2021 We did move and found a Fiberhood in Davie County, North Carolina. Read about it in this post, Adding Fiber to Your Life.
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