Mmmm, internet

[andrewducker]

Sorry about the 2002 stop-date - LJ won't let you have more than 20 entries in a scale.

[Poll #1364177]

Comments

[andrewducker]

I say 1996 because I remember Windows 95 came out without a browser in it (it was in the plus pack - but I've never encountered anyone that paid for it).

By the next year, that had looked like a pretty stupid decision. IE3 was the first "serious" version - and that was late 1996.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

I reckon Windows 98 was the watershed, with its built-in IE4 reliance, although Win95's built-in Winsock was a Good Thing.

When IE1 came out, I went to a demo at Le Manoir Aux Quat'Saisons; food was memorable, browser was not.

[drplokta]

You've encountered me, and I bought the Windows 95 Plus pack.

[andrewducker]

Nobody who was previously willing to admit to paying for it :->

Did you get it cheap? Or was there something in it worth paying for?

[drplokta]

Internet Explorer, a pretty decent pinball game and drive compression.

[astartesyriaca.livejournal.com]

I said 97 because I think it took a couple years before the public at large REALLY began to catch on and get email accounts.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

You should be sorry about the 1982 start-date -- the Internet was mainstream long before web browsers were in current use.

Similar questions about the Web would get rather different answers.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

for values of "mainstream" which mean "mainstream amongst academics".

[andrewducker]

That wasn't really what I mean by mainstream :->

[matgb]

My definition is "when normal people start using it", so I took as a benchmark when my parents got a PC for home use, which was 2000.

Another thing you could take is when email replaced faxes and phones in international sales offices as the most common communication method—for my summer job, in '99 and '00 my job was basically "sit on the fax machine sending and receiving, if you get a chance, ring people"

By '02, we all had email, and the fax machine was used a lot less, by '04, the fax machine was only really used for spam.

Solely used amongst academics does not mainstream make.

[andrewducker]

I picked 1982 because that's the year that the switchover to TCP/IP happened on ARPANET (well, it was turned on in 1983). Which seemed like a good arbitrary date when choosing my 20 year window.

I could have chosen 1969-2009, but the two-year resolution would have been less than satisfactory to me.

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Mainstream in which country ? Australia was a bit behind the US, for example, for regular home Internet services. A fair number of people (i.e. me) had access through work or university, and on Usenet we got to hear all about what they were getting access to Over There (and be very jealous).

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I'd say 'Mainstream' would post-date Boo.com going Falco.

[cdave]

By 1997 I had used the internet a few times, at internet cafes and at school, and had a home internet connection from when Freeserve launched in 1998. But that was sporadic, I wouldn't say I was regularly using it until I started uni in '99.

[autodidactic.livejournal.com]

I've been dialing in since 1992 to BBSes; I don't know if that counts, so I said 1996, pr'y cuz of Windows 95/IE.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

I first really started using the internet when we went to our friends' house in Lancashire, but regularly is a different matter. We got our first home internet connexion in '98, and my life changed completely.. :D

As for the mainstream thing.. I think it was about '96 when it seemed that a lot more people used it? I dunno. I was only 13/14, I can't remember much :P

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

me?

'net (not web) from 88 - mail, bbs etc.
web from 94 - Mosaic/compuserve

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

as in that was what I was up to. I picked 97 for mainstream web...

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

I said 1997 because I got a job for an ISP in 1996 and still had to explain to people what one was but that pretty much stopped by mid 1997.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

Does mainstream count as "usage of" or "awareness of"?

I generally figure that my parents are a good yardstick of proper mainstream usage of any technology. Whenever they start using something it's probably been mainstream for about two years. So 2002-ish. Maybe a touch later.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

I got taken to an internet cafe when I was about 12, and I got to go for an hour every few weeks.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

I think internet boomed when companies started providing unlimited broadband. Previous to this it was a moderately expensive luxury.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure broadband was the trigger. Dialup was pretty popular, and was at one time a marvel of technology. I read recently that around 5% of internet connections are still via dialup. These people are clearly more patient than I.

[andrewducker]

Agreed. FreeServe was a massive push into the public eye.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

As a teenager I was suddenly allowed to be on the internet when I wanted; and not after 6pm or when someone else didn't want the phone.

Actually, the 1p a minute dial-up, as well as unlimited dial-up, was probably another contributer to any kind of "boom" (I'd be curious to see the figures).

I think families prefer something that they can quantify; £20 a month is a fixed amount. 3p a minute, with an introverted granddaughter = god knows how much :)

[andrewducker]

I'd go for when unlimited dial-up became possible.

God, I still remember having to keep track of who used the modem, and how much, so we could divide up the phone bill at the end of the month!

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I first encountered the internet in anything like it's current form in 1993. That was only through university, and it wasn't widely available to students even then. I only had access because part of my degree was related to Computing Science. The browser we used at the time was a variant of NCSA Mosaic and I remember the network speed was so slow, you switched on the option to delay image loading as default because a single jpg would take 10+ seconds to download.

I left uni in 1996 and I don't remember anyone having the internet at home at that time. It was sometime around 1999 that my parents got it and they were among the first 10% in the village I would reckon. When it could be considered mainstream, I don't know. I would have thought something like 40% of housholds being online would be some sort of guide.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I couldn't find any graphs of internet takeup in a quick look. If you know of any then I'd appreciate a link!

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

There is some information from the NSO on the subject. Information covering 2002-2008 here (pdf) and from 1988-2004 here (Excel). There are various other reports here.

Rather than have to trawl through various files I've just retyped the figures below.

%age of households with internet acccess:

1998 - 9
1999 - 20
2000 - 34
2001 - 39
2002 - 45
2003 - 49
2004 - 51
2005 - 55
2006 - 57
2007 - 61
2008 - 65

[sageautumn.livejournal.com]

I remember being on BBS's around 1992.

So I randomly picked 1989 as mainstream because I'm allllways behind the times.

I think, perhaps, I was wrong. My other guess would be about 2000, as this was when my grandmother got online.

(erm.. equal that to most people's parents, I didn't live with my parents)

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

The all-knowing Google seems to show that my start on regular Internet use was in the spring of '95; I chose '94 as the start of mainstreaming because I remember Usenet and email to be reasonably-well populated/used when I started up directly instead of via a BBS gateway, but wasn't burgeoning.

-- Steve definitely doesn't pine for the "good old days"; the Internet has a lot more real utility (and is a lot more reliable and straightforward to use) now than it did a decade ago.

Re: Net usage

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

I had a job in '84 that gave me access to BITNet and all the places it was connected to.

I say 1994 is when the Internet became mainstream since that's the year that Eternal September came about, i.e. AOL gave all their members access to Usenet. Not technically the Internet or mainstream but that's what I think of in my mind.

(Yes, I saw your later entry but I put what I think of it as rather than what is actual. Then again, you're likely talking about your country rather than mine. I seem to just be rambling so I think I'll comment and go get food.)

[soon_lee]

Started using it in 1992 (uni), but think that it went 'mainstream' in 1998. That was the tipping year when more of my friends than not had email addresses.

[nameandnature]

Depends on what you mean by mainstream. I was at university from 1994 to 1998. They gave all students an email address, but it wasn't til around the middle of my course that it seemed more people used it than not.