Interesting how wrong you can be

[andrewducker]

In the poll this morning (UTC) the average year for the mainstreaming of the internet was 1996.  This also being the year I chose.

It looks very much like I was popular, and wrong.

a_pawson went digging through the ONS to see what the takeup figures were:

%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

Which means that even if you take 40% as mainstreaming you're not there until the end of 2001, _after_ the DotCom Bubble had burst.

Obviously, people were using it from offices before then, but even so, it looks like the wave rolled over the general public later than I thought.

Comments

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. I'd have been SO wrong on that, too. I was thinking '95, when I had access to it in my college dorm and my mom had already been dating guys she'd met on Prodigy for a couple of years.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Heh, thats your reader's bias ;)

[cdave]

I think it only really took off once Freeserve came around, and you could connect without a monthly fee.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I think the price of PC's may have had a siginficant impact too. I remember my first PC, a 486, cost me in the region of £1800 back in about 1993. My second with it's massive 133MHz Pentium processor was still over £1100 and I got that (I think) in 1997.

Nowadays you can pick up a PC for less than £250, which has made them much more affordable for many households.

[andrewducker]

Agreed. Last year I picked up a decent laptop that's better than any PC I've ever used, and plays games from a few years ago perfectly, in full resolution - for £400.

The future is _great_.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Ok, so your definition of "mainstreaming" is 40% of households ... I can quite believe it was later than the mid 90s because it was only around then that the first billboard and tv ads started adding a URL ... so it was still an aspirational and geeky thing.

A lot of households had some form of computer (even if it was a ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 or something a little more modern) very few of them had modems and the only "data" to the house other than modem/acoustic coupler was ISDN (v.v.expensive) ... according to this page, in 2001 81% of people in the UK accessing the internet used diallup (probably a lot of those using the various "free" internet services that made money off the phone calls!) and 8% using ISDN, so the final 10% or so were divided between the new ADSL, cable modems, mobile internet and "other".

I'm actually surprised it's as high as 65% in 2008 ... and wondering when the "mainstreaming" of mobile phones was in comparison.

[andrewducker]

Yup - I had ISDN for a couple of years before I got ADSL. And darned expensive it was too, especially as initially it wasn't eligible for the same cheapness that POTS got.

40% was a figure someone else suggested - it seemed kinda reasonable too.

Mobile phones seem to have been much slower in comparison - I don't have any figures to hand for that though.

[cdave]

Is this bit by Charlie Stross what you want?

[andrewducker]

Perfect!

[andrewducker]

cdave just pointed me at a link to Charlie's blog, with a handy graph...

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Whoa, we really were ahead of the times. I got addicted to the internet back with BBSes, after we moved to Colorado in 1993. Huh.

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

Going back to '98 my place of work was a residential bungalow and we paid something in the region of 400GBP/month for a 250kbps connection - that was still in place in early 2000 when I left. Prior to that it was dial up over dual ISDN. I personally didn't switch to broadband until after most of my work colleagues, sometime around 2002, but I'd had dialup from whenever it was Demon internet started using turnpike (wiki-p says 1995 which sounds about right). Prior to that I was into the BBS scene and fidonet going back far longer that I'd like to admit :)

I find it rather amusing that internet access at uni was strictly limited. You had to fill out a form stating a reason (research or whatever), how very quaint. Then the web started to gain momentum and things started to open up when I graduated in '96.

Trouble is I always think of the 90's as like 5-6 years ago :)

[martling.livejournal.com]

Rather than take a percentage uptake as mainstreaming, look at the rate of adoption. Between 1998 and 2000 the number of households online more than tripled. I'd say those years marked the mainstreaming.

The dotcom bubble often gets talked about as having being inflated by pure hype, but that misses the fact that there was very real growth going on at incredible speeds, in terms of market and customer base and business growth.

In 2001 that rapid growth basically stopped - and the bubble, which depended on it continuing, burst.

[fetket.livejournal.com]

The figures are right. The problem is you are not mainstream. You a geek and an ex student... most students went internet way before everybody else... I went with janet pre-html for goodness sake. Html only came about in 1990 and wasn't really adopted until version 2.. 1993?, and is the core of what we conceive of as the web (please note the conceive of). Netscape wasn't a company until 1994 (founded as mosaic).

To be honest it was the turn of the millennium that brought the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the creation of the mainstream internet, as much caused by that collapse as anything else. All these companies suddenly had to produce and produce well, they didn't get their fleet of corporate harrier jump jets for doing nothing any more. Suddenly things had to be marketed at everyday life, and not specialists or geeks, otherwise the revenue and the shares would not be supported.