

Internet at NPR (1994) - rbanffy
http://nprchives.tumblr.com/post/84119269701/a-memo-from-20-years-ago-today-key-quote-the

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madcaptenor
If you read the actual memo (as opposed to the transcription below it),
there's no "The". It's interesting that whoever did the transcription put in
the definite article, because usage has changed in the last twenty years.

(The memo as a whole, it seems, goes back and forth between "the Internet" and
just bare "Internet".)

~~~
xhrpost
I actually came to the comments just to talk about this. Not the flip-flop in
the article you're pointing out, but I've often wonder when the switch
happened in general. Old articles and even TV[1] will use Internet without the
definite article. Then, sometime in the mid-late 90's, we started placing
'The' out in front.

My guess would be that techies originally did not use the definite article
because other networks existed and had their own names. FidoNet, BITNET, etc.
Thus 'Internet' was just a name to distinguish between other networks. Then,
as the mainstream population started using Internet and saw that as the sole
go-to network, it became 'The' Internet.

[1] [http://youtu.be/fxfhInhkvtM](http://youtu.be/fxfhInhkvtM)

~~~
billiam
As someone doing scientific computing back then, you nailed it. We
distinguished Internet from the other networks already in use.

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howeman
It's been fun to watch the E-MAIL --> E-Mail --> E-mail --> e-mail --> email
transition

~~~
martiuk
Who even puts a dash between the e and mail nowadays?

"I'll just email you instead"

~~~
logfromblammo
I sometimes use a hyphen. I would never use a dash in that fashion. The
National Society for Grammatical Correctness would like to invite you to our
re-education camp. After a fun day of hand-sorting hyphens, en dashes, and em
dashes, you will collapse onto your hard concrete slab knowing that
punctuation is as important to the sentence as spelling is to the word--and
also that Grammar Nazis are jerks.

But the real question is why we haven't simply dropped the 'e' altogether and
differentiate it from the physical shipment of papers by calling the latter
"postal mail" or "snail mail" or "paper mail" or something else reflecting its
reduced status as a means of communication.

~~~
hackuser
There is only one dash/em/en/hyphen. ASCII has overruled the NSGC.

~~~
chronomex
If we're going to be pedants, it's a HYPHEN-MINUS.
[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/002d/index.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/002d/index.htm)

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troymc
Ah yes, the days when "Internet" books for the general public had sections
about Gopher, Veronica, Email, HTML, FTP, Archie, Telnet, WAIS…

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news_to_me
"...such that any statistic on the numbers of connected computers and users is
obsolete before the numbers are uttered."

This quote struck me as a little over the top; was such parlance common in
those days? Certainly the Internet's growth was shocking, but this sentence
seems more spirited, like something from a 90s hacker movie.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
To some extent, that's what it was like. There was a feeling of the future
happening faster than our eyes could take it in. I would be you'd see similar
hyperbole discussing micro computing in the 80s, space flight in the 60s and
jet flight in the 50s. The 70s and 00s seem to have suffered from no
optimistic technology boom. I hope the teens fixes that.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
As a boy, I was fond of a quote to the effect of "If all technology had
progressed as quickly as computer technology, you would be able to buy a Space
Shuttle at the corner store, fold it up and put it in your pocket, and fly it
to Mars on a gallon of gas."

That was from the late '80s. By now, presumably, your gallon of gas would get
you to Alpha Centauri.

I also find it kind of depressing that the excitement over the infinite
potential of the Net has settled down to workaday humdrum.

~~~
rbanffy
> your gallon of gas would get you to Alpha Centauri.

In less than an hour ;-)

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transientbug
I love how you have to attend an hour long class and file a form to get an npr
email address :) It's interesting to see the difference between whats
portrayed in the memo and what today is like where the internet is fairly
common place and accepted.

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danso
This reads like a proper email...but I'm guessing the memo itself had to be
passed around as paper. It's measure of how much things have changed that I
had to stop and think about how that actually worked...then I remember in the
early 2000s, in the newsrooms and offices I worked in, we had physical
"inboxes", and office assistants who spent their day walking around and
passing out printouts and faxes. I wonder how long until people will have a
hard time remembering how letters through the post were sent?

~~~
a_c_s
It reads like a proper email because emails are memos ;-)

