My take on the Internet, ca. 1994

Here’s something I found recently: from my work notebook in 1994, a page where I was explaining to a consultant colleague what the Internet was:

Lots of interesting things here:

• Correctly identified Cisco as a key player
• Mosaic is the browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla didn’t exist yet)
• Comparative diagrams of the Internet/WWW compared to the interactive television stuff being promoted by Time Warner and such – the key difference being the fragmented span of control (Internet) vs. integrated span of control (interactive TV).
• Discussion questions:
  • Who makes money where?
  • Who controls the architecture?
  • Who controls the customer?
  • Who invests the greatest amount?
  • If the Internet were a telco, how would it compare? (Probably the 5th or 6th largest in world – in 1994)
• Included links to existing back-end systems