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Online: Remember Your Very First Time?

Written on August 6, 2008 – 9:36 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Graphical Internet access with SLIRP and MacPPP

I spent hours tweaking this…

At TheNextWeb.org we like to look forward and talk about events as they happen. But today I would like to look back and make you remember the very first time you went online. How did it feel? What did you do? How did it change your life?

My first time online was in 1995. I had bought a modem after I graduated from art school and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A local ISP was very helpful with setting up ‘Config PPP’ and TCP/IP on my Macintosh Quadra 660AV. The whole procedure took us about two hours. I was one of the fist Apple Macintosh clients the ISP had. I think the whole company consisted of just one guy with a bunch of modems under his bed.

Getting connected took a few minutes and started with the familiar screeching sounds every modem used to make when trying to connect. It generally took multiple tries to get connected and often I would get disconnected without reason mid-session anyway. My dial-up speed was 14.4k and the first browser I used was Mosaic but I used that only to get to Netscape and then used Fetch to download a version of Netscape.

I don’t remember what version of Netscape I used but do remember the 2.0 version coming out not long after I got online. I also remember that a new version of HTML was introduced which allowed background images. Suddenly the web looked so much cooler!

My Macintosh Centris 660AV

Within a day or two I realized I wanted to build homepages too and had to learn HTML. So I got on my bike and went looking for a book that would teach me HTML. I remember vividly sitting in my parents garden reading my “HTML 1.0″ book and trying to explain to my parents how incredibly exciting that was.

Within a week or so I had built my first homepage which relied heavily on my Apple Quicktake 1.0 and Photoshop 1.0. Unfortunately within a month my ISP took my site offline because it was generating too much traffic. Ever since I have been hooked.

So, now it is your turn. When did you go online and what happened?

I hope you like that post!

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1995, history, internet, ISP, memories, online, word wide web

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Reality in Sweden: download a HD DVD in two seconds

Written on July 6, 2008 – 8:53 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Sweden is often celebrated as THE best wired place in the world. Almost all Swedes can enjoy a super fast broadband connection. But even these people are likely to get jealous when they hear the story about Sigbritt Löthberg, a 75-year old woman from Karlstad. Three years ago, her home was supplied with the world’s fastest Internet connection: a staggering 40 Gigabits per second.

In theory that means she’s able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously, but something tells me she won’t do this. However, she might want to download a full high definition DVD every once and a while. She will only have to wait for two seconds.

Peter Löthberg: “I was sent by God to network the planet”

For the secret behind her connection, we have to consult her son, Swedish Internet legend Peter Löthberg - who now works at Cisco. He developed a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometers apart, with no intermediary transponders. “I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has,” Löthberg told The Local.

With this extreme connection, Löthberg and the local network company Karlstad Stadsnät want to show that ISP’s should invest in better technologies, as it will soon become interesting economically speaking. The network boss said the whole process wasn’t really complicated: “The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt’s PC”.

Although this took daring experiment took place three years ago, we’re still not able to browse drastically faster than we used to. Partly to bandwidth limitations as the hard disk - like Pragma points out in the comment, but also because most people don’t know what they’re missing.

If you’re coming from StumbleUpon, you probably like to see Bill Gates face in this short video!

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HD DVD, ISP, Karlstad Stadsnät, Peter Löthberg, Sigbritt Löthberg, sweden

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