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

[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.