It's interesting that this article didn't mention Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota. Jean Amour Polly would have definitely known about it, as back then the Gopher Team was all about creating Digital Libraries.
And Mark McCahill was a ardent Windsurfer, which resulted in this shirt, designed by his partner Wendy Jedeckila, way back in 1991!
If you look up her guide on project Gutenberg, there are references to Gopher. It's nostalgic to see "WorldWideWeb" getting a brief mention as as another service that you can try out.
Bess blocked sites about evolution I tried to visit when I was preparing for a biology class debate. Luckily, the local ISP’s proxy was dead simple to configure in Netscape 4 and got around Bess.
The article is very interesting but am I the only one that feels weirded out by how articles like these are published on the web?
There's no author information besides "Editor at SurferToday" in the HTML metadata. I understand that some people may wish to publish anonymously, but I think if you used a pseudonym like John Surfer it would at least feel like an actual person wrote it in our current era of AI-generated articles.
There's no date of publication. Of course the page itself may change with any CSS/template change and one of the great things of URLs is that you can modify the article with more recent information, still, having a date is kind of important.
There is no attribution. So is this an article of someone who interviewed her personally or is it a transcription of the video? The video is not by Surfer Today, it's from a channel called "Imagining the Digital Future Center" with 900 subscribers, but the actual brand on the video is called Internet Hall of Fame.
I've seen so many articles like this and it always feels so strange to me for some reason.
The term Channel Surfing predates all this by at least a decade. I first heard the term in the early '80, about the time when cable systems starting becoming the norm.
It's not too much a stretch to go from channel surfing to internet surfing.
Similar phrases that were, as it were, in the water at the time: bar surfing, bedroom surfing, boy/girl surfing.
I suspect a lot of these usages were regional, I know "bedroom surfing" was something I heard while living in Los Angeles. But "bar surfing" (and bar hopping) was common in the south as well.
Not trying to take anything away from anyone who first published the internet variations of this. But it was a thing before the internet.
In the mid-90's when I first got on the Web, I encountered one or two web sites that did have a quite hostile message in its "HTTP 404 Not Found" page: "Your Illegal Access Has Been Logged!"
At Yahoo! the department that maintained the directory of websites was called 'surfing' and the employees were 'surfers'. Their full-time job was to add summaries and categorize new websites. And who could forget the huge project of extending the 10 top level categories to 16?
I remember calling up yahoo on the phone and arguing that weddings should get its own category. We had a wedding website and it was lost under "Business".
Yes, we called and talked to someone on the PHONE at Yahoo.
The submission title is wrong. The title of the article is The women who coined the expression 'Surfing the Internet' not "woman", reflecting the two people the article discusses.
As a teen in the 90's, I remember the first time I heard someone use the terms "surfing the internet", "surfing the web", "information superhighway", "cyber-anything"... I can assure you the terms were as cringe back then as they are today. I half-suspect the desperate attempts by the media to make it sound hip to boomers may well have set adoption back years.
To me "Surfing the internet" is a bit formal but "surfing the net" or "surfing the web" is still a non-cringe thing said at the office and we're a bunch of computer networking engineers. "Information superhighway" has always been a cliche for me though... but I was quite young in the 90s and it had really died off by the 2000s anyways. Cyber- largely depends on the thing to me. E.g. cyberspace - about neutral, cybersecurity - not at all cringe, cyberculture - cringey, cyberbullying - neutral (as in the term, not the act), cybernetics - usually cringey, cybercafe - cringey/outdated, and so on.
"Cybernetics" has an actual meaning distinct from anything to do with the Internet, and precedes it by decades. It is about using feedback from sensors to control something. It was based on observations of biological control systems, and creating principles from them for machines. For example using a gyroscope reading in a PID-loop that runs motors to keep a robot steady. The word comes from "Kuber" in Greek, which means "to steer".
The Internet-connotation comes from the "Cyberspace" in William Gibson's novel "Neuromancer", where it was supposed to be jacked into the brain: thereby the connection to biological control systems, and thus cybernetics.
I personally cringe at most modern uses of "cyber-". The only I don't to is "cyberpunk", which refers to environments and aesthetics as in novels such as Neuromancer.
I'm also a kid of the 90s and I still use it :) At least in German, "im Internet surfen" has always been a completely normal expression for, well, surfing the internet. What would the hip people use instead?
I was a teen in the 2000s and in my cultural sphere they weren't considered cringey at all (in fact, in 2000s UK we didn't really have a concept of cringe like we have today)
> we didn't really have a concept of cringe like we have today
We didn't use the word in the same syntactical manner - things make you cringe, or are cringeworthty - but I can assure you that my very British mother was using the word properly to refer to the same kind of things back then.
(And as a UK teen back then... yes, I cringed at the term!)
Yeah, a lot of people who developed important technologies (TCP/IP: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn; Unix: Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson) were born in the 1940s. My grandmother is in the same age range, but barely knows how to use a cell phone. Many young people nowadays are apparently the same way. It seems like there's always been different groups of people with varying levels of familiarity with technology; it was never a generational divide.
It's a good name, to me it's similar to "browsing the internet". Which in my mind is just "looking" around on the internet without necessarily contributing as such, like posting on blogs, playing names, sending emails etc.
Browsing the internet like just browsing in a store.
We didn't "Surf the Internet", we surfed the Information
Superhighway. Before that we "browsed" like ruminants, consuming
slowly with very strong stomachs, and sometimes regurgitating. Then
we got caught in the "Web". Time's fun when you're having flies, as
the spider joked.
> We didn't "Surf the Internet", we surfed the Information Superhighway
For many of us, it was more like the "Information Country Road" with the speeds we had. I don't think I had ADSL access until 2006/2007 sometime, then it actually felt like a super highway. But before that, "paddling the Internet" would have been more accurate.
Yeah but you could get information from anywhere and if you grew up traveling on the Interstate system, it still felt like you could be "instantly" transported to a piece of knowledge. It was still hecka faster than getting to your local library, browsing through the card catalog, and only then looking something up in an index (at the back of a book), if your library even had it.
Of course, we weren't on there for the books, but for the people.
Even at 1200 baud you could be more or less instantly transported to university systems all across the country.
"The future is now. Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone, and computer. You'll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, and watch female mud wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam. There's no end to the possibilities."
Modern netcode can hide a lot of this latency. You can definitely play with someone far away, though the experience won't be as consistent and reliable is with someone nearby. But things are always improving!
Most of the issue is with jitter, not latency. If you had a dedicated point-to-point link to your friend in Vietnam you could play a flawless game of Mortal Kombat for sure!
I don't think I ever witnessed anyone use the term "information superhighway" for any purpose other than mockery of the term "information superhighway."
Damnit, Fred Harris, of course. Thanks. Old mind plays tricks. Also
I found a sweet "Micro Live" episode (Ian McNaught-Davis and Lesley
Judd), but no mention of the "superhighway".
We used to be “Navigating” and “Exploring”, implying deep water and unknown riches on the other side. It’s pretty apt then how “surfing” implies shallow waters in a static location where the “””content””” comes to you.
"I wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well."
I miss how fun the internet used to be. There is something lost with the current torrent of entertainment that is readily fed through popularity based algorithms. Hacker news is about as close as I get to that feeling, but it’s not the same since it’s completely hub and spoke. Youtube can come close in a similar way, if you stay away from shorts. But, what I really miss, is how often I found myself falling off the web into other places on the internet. gopher and telnet and archie. There were these other places to explore, and because the net was so much smaller it made sense to explore.
FWIW, I’ve had a similar sensation playing on a shared minecraft server recently, the stuff people build is so varying and interesting.
I'd argue that the internet today actually requires more skill to use than it did back in the day - it's difficult to avoid the content blackholes that exist and, if you're truly masochistic, you could try the "Browse through twenty site links without ever submitting a request to facebook.com" challenge - assuming you're not using an ad/domain blocker (which you should be).
There are a lot of extremely niche things on the internet still and I agree that Youtube (and Nebula!) are where they mostly reside. Sadly gone are the days when just typing up some rudimentary HTML would qualify as engaging content to most people... I met my wife on a MUD - but now you need webcams, editors and production value to make content.
Even "I'm Feeling Lucky" was interesting long ago. Back then, the median website was pretty interesting, and you had a pretty good chance of finding something great randomly. Now, it just sends you to canned, boring product SERP pages and Wikipedia pages. If you actually had an interface that pointed you to a uniformly random web site, you're mostly going to get SEO spam and machine-generated content.
> The mouse pad was designed by Steve Cisler, who had been hired at the Apple Library as librarian. However, Apple thought the title librarian was too boring and so named him an Information Surfer.
And Mark McCahill was a ardent Windsurfer, which resulted in this shirt, designed by his partner Wendy Jedeckila, way back in 1991!
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10274778...