Remembering the DotCom Boom : Part 1 – Who owns the “Internet”?
Lots of people compare the current Crypto Boom to the DotCom Boom and having been lucky enough to have lived through both (so far) I think I’m qualified to at least say something about it. I’ve been watching the series Halt and Catch Fire recently and while that show is set in the 1980s it’s got me thinking back to when I was a teenager and then a young adult because it feels so very close to home for me. I thought I’d write a few stories from that time and maybe those Millennials who weren’t with us back then might appreciate some of my experiences and recognise the parallels to what’s happening in Crypto today.
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It was 1996 and as a young naïve 23 year old I was so excited about the Internet that I’d spent a fair chunk of that year planning and then setting up an Internet Café and Dial Up Internet Service in the Central Business District of my hometown. It was a time when people didn’t really know what the “Internet” was, but it had become a bit of a buzzword so a few people were at least talking about it. Email was a pretty new thing too and only a tiny percentage of people had their own email address.
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Anyway, as part of my shop setup I’d put a big neon box sign up out front with “INTERNET” written on it to let potential clients know they could get Internet access inside. But a few doors up from me was another business called “Internet Travel”. As far as I knew they were just a Travel Agent using a buzzword but when the business owner paid me a visit in those first few days of setting up shop and told me I needed to take my Internet sign down I was a bit shocked. Apparently he felt there was some sort of trademark infringement going on and I had to explain to him that the Internet was an actual thing that nobody could own because it was decentralised. It really just confirmed to me that their business actually had nothing to do with the Internet, but I was still a bit concerned about the possibility of a legal challenge. It never came.
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Looking them up today I see they are still in business while I went down about 6 years later after the DotCom bubble had boomed and then burst. So I guess you could say that he got the last laugh. The reason why I tell this story is that it so similar to Crypto today in that the new technology that was about to transform the world and disrupt a lot of established businesses….was just getting started and was so poorly understood. Back then I’d have people come into my shop and commonly ask “What’s this Internet thing all about?” just like today when people ask me “What’s this Bitcoin thing all about?”.
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I was on the coalface of that technology revolution back in the 90s and I must have introduced thousands of people to the Internet. Now that I’m a bit older and wiser I am trying to be a bit smarter about how I ride this new technology revolution. But if you ask me if they are similar, I’ll tell you for certain – Absolutely! I was early on the trend back then and I am early again now, but I won’t make the same mistakes this time around….well, maybe check back with me in 6 years and we’ll see if I did any better.
Were you an early adopter?
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This was my internet, and man was it S L O W ..... It was the mid 90's and everything was moving very quickly. This was about the time credit card readers came out before the readers you had these fancy things.
100% agree with you, this feels awfully close to dot.com bubble and the crypto's will change this world forever just like dot.com did. Nice write up brothra!
Thanks mate. We were mostly a cash business so I don't think we even had one of those old sliders.
Thanks for sharing.
Looks like I was in the first 10% of the internet having dial up CLI back in 1992 or so. Gopher was probably more popular than HTTP at the time.
Both the .com boom and crypto follow the same pattern as other booms. The time to reach the first 10% market saturation is roughly the same as going from 10% to 90%.
In crypto, we are probably around 1 or 2% saturation right now. There is a long ways to go. And when everyone is using crypto for all kinds of things from payments to social media to allocating network resources, they will say "of course we are, what's the big deal?"
Just like nobody today thinks email or web pages are a big deal because they are so omni-present.
Indeed it is easy to take these advancements for granted, but it was not so long ago. It doesn't take long for technology to become ancient history these days.
Cool story. I'm glad I told you about Halt and Catch Fire! Lol, thinking they own the word "internet".
Also, I remember when I used to go to into work to use 'the good internet'.
Yes, HCF was definitely a good tip which I am very grateful for thank you :)
In the latter part of the 90s I was working for a state welfare agency, and then working for a newspaper before starting up my own. The internet back then was dial up, and would inevitably drop the connection in the middle of us sending over files for the printer. We did deliver them on a disc for a while, but then tried it over dial up (took hours), and then we had a satellite hook up, but that's all getting into the early two thousands.
I messed around with AOL and Netscape for a while. I didn't really try to do any kind of online business, or internet cafe or anything like that. I'd say you were more than an early adopter. You were an early entrepreneur, with the ability to make some money. Adopters generally get to spend money, unless they've invested—then they might get rewarded if things take off.
I had the ability to make some money, just not the common sense. A head full of ideals and no real knowledge of how the world really worked. Maybe not much has changed :)
Well, now, I'm going to say that it's hard to make it through life without figure out how the world works, so while I can believe your head is still full of ideals, you've got a pretty good handle on how the world works. And if you're still trying to defy that, or work around it, it's because it's not all what it's cracked up to be and needs to change. And there's nothing wrong with that at all.
I find myself in that space all the time. I just tend to make stories out of it because the world isn't bound to change like I can fictionally change it. :)
Showing your age now fella. I was only 16 in '95 but I remember it very well. We had the Internet and I loved it. You couldn't do a lot back then, but I knew and recognised the possibilities.
When friends ask me about bitcoin(the only crypto most know) I use the whole Internet thing as an example.
Yes, I think enough people have already figured out I am an old fart.
I'll try and not make these sound too much like "back in my day" type posts because the way I see it this is still "my day" but the parallels are hard to ignore.
I will simply say that i used to see movies .sports chamnels upto 2000, then i got involve in various social media network upto 2017,,
But now i realize i am doing useless thing why am i doung this ,, then i became the crypto ..
Thanks for sharing your exprience..
Internet cafe! That is a blast from the past!
I remember at college (aka uni/university) we had email but you had to walk to the library to use it. And then who were your going to message? Just your friend who had walked to the library with you because people out in the world didn’t have email/Internet yet. 😄 This was 1992-1996. The good old days. ☺️
Yes, I guess all uni students back then got email and were somewhat forced to be early adopters. Though I don't really remember using my uni email and I dropped out around 95.
Thanks for sharing mate, how did the business go down? you would have been an early innovator and in prime position to ride that wave...... well there must a severe lack travel agents over there...
It was inevitable really. How many Internet Cafes and local dialup services are around these days?
I might write a few more parts to my dotCom story that will also give you some clues ;)
All right then :-)
I was watching cricket matches on CRT TV and the closest interaction I had with Internet/PCs was reading about them in newspapers.
My first recollection of using internet ( in cafes) is in early 2000s