Web at 25

[Riptide]

And this:

The News Mait Intelligence site -- a seething miasma of bitter complaints about cheapskate publishers, gutless editors, and boneheaded fellow employees -- has risen to Web heaven. A gossipy gripe board of sometimes dubious accuracy about working conditions at several hundred newspapers across the country ("This Just In," News, May 15), the site was dismantled recently after its founder concluded that it was taking over his life.

"I couldn't continue to spend hours and hours going through this with a fine-toothed comb," says Maurice "Mo" Tamman, a 33-year-old expatriate Brit who's a reporter for Florida Today. The beginning of the end, he says, came in October, when the trade magazine Editor & Publisher did a cover story on his site. Suddenly, the number of messages he received doubled, to about 150 a week. Already unhappy with the over-the-top quality of many of the messages, Tamman tried revamping the entire intelligence section, only to have two weeks' worth of work wiped out when his computer crashed. "I must say, I was devastated," he understates.

http://home.comcast.net/~dkennedy56/phoenix_981211mait.html


By the way, that first graf reads as if it were written by Dan Jenkins.

 

[Songbird]

This is a fun place -- http://archive.org/web/ -- to check out early pages from SportsJournalists.com.

 

[Songbird]

November 30, 2001, is the earliest screen capture.

 

[Songbird]

You ever go back to read your stuff that's at least 10 years old?

Just did that for a bunch of gamers and features and previews.

I can honestly say that the spirit of the writing was strong. Strong information, too. The style was over the top at times and makes me chuckle a bit, but I had a lot of fun. I read the stuff 10 years later and think how much tighter the stories could have been. I was a 1-man department, by and large, and had so much to cover. I wrote on the fly and banged out the pages. So little time for editing.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

I had a professor junior year who would send assignments out by email. It was done specifically to make sure everyone had an email account. It wasn't a big deal for me, because I used my email regularly during college, but for a lot of people it was a major pain in the ass for them, having to go to a library to check their email...

 

[Buck]

In 1983, 74 percent of respondents agreed that ability to shop online would leads to buying 'too many things that aren't in the family budget.'

That's wild.

 

[cranberry]

The Wire Service Guild used a CompuServ message board to post AP contract negotiation bulletins in 1989.

 

[Buck]

It's only 31 years ago, and only 1.4 percent US adults used the Internet.

That is mind blowing.

In 1995, it was 14 percent.

Now it's 87 percent.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

In 1983, 74 percent of respondents agreed that ability to shop online would leads to buying 'too many things that aren't in the family budget.'

That's wild.

I think the first concept I had about the Internet was seeing Matthew Broderick change his grades and nearly start a nuclear war in War Games.

In high school, the dad of one of my friends had one of the early modems that looked like a phone. We asked him a couple years later when we all had internal modems and he said, "Not only did I never use that modem, I never plugged it in. They just gave it to me for work."

 

[HejiraHenry]

Seems like it must have been mid-1995 for me, when I went to work in a D.C.-area public relations office.

Not sure that I had a non-AOL, non-work e-mail address until 1998, though.

 

[wicked]

Late 1996 or early 1997, and it's been a major time suck ever since.

 

[Vombatus]

Two pages in, and not much discussion of PORN yet.

One word: WIFEY

 

[Baron Scicluna]

I also remember telling my father about the internet in '94 and he scoffed about it. Until one night, when we were watching an NFL game and they put up a graphic promoting something and included and email address. I turned to my Dad and said, "see, I told you."

I also kick myself that I'm terrible at technical stuff and didn't think about either inventing something to do with the Web, or investing in somebody like Apple or Microsoft.