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Remembrances of things past
Internet Access Here Sign (Photo credit: Steve Rhode)
I’ve reblogged a great article with a poor title from GigaOm, “The one big thing that newspaper visionaries didn’t foresee.”
That article brought back so many memories, particularly the memo from 1992 by Robert Kaiser, a former editor at the Washington Post. I won’t rehash any of it here, I strongly recommend you go read the whole thing to get the full context.
My story is the other, non-commercial side of media and the development of the internet.
In 1991, two momentous things happened that completely changed the course of my life: I was hired to be the Production Manager of The Kitchen, the downtown NYC arts space, by Lauren Dyer Amazeen, who seven years later was to become my wife; and I logged on to the internet for the first time.
I’d been online since 1984, first on Compuserve, and then as an indie, hopping around NYC BBS’s and using things like Fidonet. In the late 80’s/early 90’s I began to hear about this amazing thing called “the Internet,” (We capitalised the “I” back then.) It was like a massive collection of linked BBS’s that you could access in real time, unlike FidoNet. After doing a bit of research, I discovered Panix, one of the first services that offered internet access to the general public.
I fired up my Atari MegaSTe (mainly used for creating music at that point), dialed up Panix, set up an account and from there, I was hooked.
Related articles
- A Vision for the Future of Newspapers – 20 Years Ago (recoveringjournalist.typepad.com)
- The one big thing that newspaper visionaries didn’t foresee (gigaom.com)
John Maxwell Hobbs 