I would almost have forgotten it, but 2005 marks my 10th anniversary of being “online”. To be more accurate: from approximately 1993 till 1995 I was ‘semi-online’ using a dial-up connection to some Dutch bulletin boards like “Utopia” (later to become the first Dutch Internet provider called XS4ALL). I also had my own BBS (called WindowsBBS) using the Spitfire BBS software version 3.4. Then, in 1995 I started working for an Internet company called “Riverland Networks” and this marked my first steps on, what we now know as the “Internet”. Looking back it is hard to imagine my life without the Internet. To me it has become as important as electricity, the telephone or TV – or oxygen for that matter…
The Early days
Those early days were a lot different from now. Using dial-up to access a BBS was something “magical”. The sound of the modems interacting or, as I called it: the “mating call of the modem”, was so recognizable. After a while I was even able to recognize by the pitch of the sound what speed my connection was. I mostly did it to get my hands on PC games and software. I had an Intel 286 12mhz PC with a whopping 20megabyte hard disk. Back then it cost me about 3000 guilders and another 500 guilders for the matrix printer I bought with it. I used Word Perfect 5.1 (I started out with with version 4.3 or so), and was running DOS 4.0 or something.
I would have loved to use a Mac back then (the Mac Classic model), but I could just not afford them – even back then they were a lot more expensive then regular DOS PC’s. Nowadays I use a Mac at my work (Powerbook G4), and PC’s at home. Both speed and storage (hardware) have multiplied enormously while prices have stayed somewhat the same.
Back then multitasking was almost unknown of in the PC world (in the mainframe world it was normal off course) except for some program from Quarterdeck Desqview that ran on top of DOS on a Intel 386 together with QEMM-386 and made it possible to ‘switch’ between tasks (programs). It was the time of OS/2 and big mainframes. The Internet already existed, but it was mostly text based and using a shell account was about it.
Downloading a ZIP file (yeah: that’s how old ZIP is!) took forever with my 2400 baud modem. I remember that I wanted to buy a 14k4 modem that was roughly 8 times faster, but they cost a fortune (almost a 1000 guilders), so I upgraded to 9600 baud. Off course dialing into a BBS wasn’t cheap either: you had to pay for every minute online thanks to KPN (or PTT Telecom as they were called back then).
My First E-mail
In early 1995 I started to become interested in this new phenomenon called “Internet”. On January 15, 1994, De Digitale Stad (“The Digital City”) opened the result of a joint venture by De Balie, the Amsterdam cultural center, and XS4ALL. DDS was a Free-Net, a free system open to the public. The aim of DDS was to bring politics and citizens together in an online community. It was my first e-mail address ever, but you could not mail worldwide: only within Holland.
Then in April or May 2005, by chance, I met Jan Jacobs, a former journalist and publisher. He had just started a Dutch Internet company called Riverland Networks together with some Dutch and Belgium partners. I started to work there in June ’95 (I think) as an online journalist publishing my news on the website RIV.NET. That was pretty special: together with Dutch journalist Francisco van Jole and Erwin van de Zande, I was one of the first people in Holland to publish daily news about the Internet – exclusively – and only on a website.
I remember that when I started, I used Windows 3.11 (aka Windows for Workgroups) and Windows NT 3.51 together with Netscape 1.22 and some weird program called “trumpet winsock”. Later that year I witnessed the introduction of Windows 95 in Holland. I got it for free with my press kit, together with a copy of Office 95. Both on a bunch of 3.5” floppy disks.
Early adaptors
The World Wide Web back then was also know as the “World Wide Wait” and the phone bill you would get (using dial-up) was killing. Roughly 1 percent of all Dutch were online: mostly young men (IT-students). There were hardly any Internet providers: Planet Internet had just started and worked mostly in and around the big cities. In hindsight it is obvious that I (and my colleges) were really “early adaptors” here in Holland.
That same year (’95) Netscape 2.0 was launched and it started a whole revolution on its own. Microsoft wasn’t that interested yet in Internet and the WWW. We had a leased 1mbit line at work which cost us about 10k a year. In contrast: I myself now have a 8mbit DSL line for 65 Euro’s. Bandwidth has become a commodity now.
Something new every day
Amazon opened it’s online stores in ’95. And on Wednesday, Aug. 9, 1995, a 16-month-old Silicon Valley startup called Netscape tried to go public, but demand for the shares was so high that for almost two hours that morning, trading couldn’t open. The stock, which had been priced at $28 a share, zoomed as high as $75 that day and closed at $58. Turning its owners into the first Internet millionaires in the blink of an eye.
Every day it seemed something new happened and it was a very exiting time. I remember how exited everyone was when streaming audio became reality with the first release of Realaudio. The quality was less than an AM radio station, but everyone in the room realized the potential. I remember saying: “Now, if only they could do this with video. You could be watching TV from any country in any other country on earth”. And off course, two years later, in 1997 there was RealVideo.
I witnessed the rise (and later the fall) of the infamous peer-to-peer file sharing program Napster in 1999. Suddenly I – and the rest of the world – could get my hands on literally any piece of music I could think of. At it’s high in 2001 Napster had 26.4 million users worldwide. After many legal problems, it shut down in 2002.
Other phenomena like “search engines” emerged. First there was Yahoo (more or less the equivalent to the “Yellow Pages”). Then in 1995 AltaVista was launched: it was fast and had always came up with the right information. For three years it was the only search engine I used. One of the irritating things however, were the banners and the fact that after a while it wasn’t as fast as it used to be.
Romance without frontiers
In 1997 I met my girlfriend online. I was experimenting with a chat program that worked as a plug-in with a browser at my work and I needed a website to test it out. On the plug-in manufacturers website “www.match.com” was listed as one of the sites to use this plug-in. So I registered and started chatting. Before I had used IRC but I was put of by the degree of smut there and the total lack of intelligent conversation. Mostly it was a result of the fact that less than 2 percent of all people online were female. But since Match was a paid website, the level of conversation was a lot better. In the summer of ’97 I flew to Florida and hooked up with my online romance. We are still seeing each other.
It is estimated that between 1995 and 2000 a few million people met online and got hooked up. Nowadays Internet-dating has gone mainstream. The Internet turned out not just to be a technological phenomenon, but also a sociological. With chat programs, webcams, VOIP etc. the possibilities are almost endless to meet each other.
In late 1998 I discovered this new search engine called “Google”. With its minimal design and lightning fast search, I quickly dumped AltaVista and all the others: I haven’t used any other search engine since then. Google since then has become such a prominent company that they now even have become a verb in many languages (“to google”) and as such a household name. The have branched out into other areas as well with free Webmail (Gmail), blogging (Blogger.com), Google Talk (chat), photography (Picasa) and many other ventures (Google Earth).
Gaining momentum: the hype
In the second half of the ‘90’s the Internet in Holland (just as in the rest of the Western world) exploded. The number of people going online doubled about every 2-3 months. Not in the last place because in Holland a lot of “free” Internet providers started. You could get Internet access for free (more or less) with providers like ‘Raketnet’ and ‘Superweb’ (all gone). It seemed that the commercial side of Internet exploded too. E-commerce was the keyword and companies tried hard not to miss their share of the hype. It was the ‘new economy’ (‘Newconomy’)versus the ‘old economy’.
It was the top of the hype. Internet companies started to pop-up like mushrooms and died equally quick. Most of them didn’t even bother to think through a good business model. They were just blinded by technology and dollar signs. It was the time of hypes like ‘social networks’, Bitmagic and ‘Pointcast’. The latter was a screensaver that displayed news. It was a nice program, but when all the people in Silicon Valley would take their lunch break, it used up all the bandwidth in California (very expensive).
The Bubble bursts
Early 2000 (after the Millennium Bug/Y2K hype) the Internet bubble bursts in Holland. The next 2 years a lot of companies went bankrupt and hundreds – if not thousands – of people working in IT got fired. Especially after 9/11 2001 Holland got hit hard: and I got fired too from my job at Lost Boys. In a way it reminded me of the big ‘regular’ IT bubble from the late ‘80’s. A big shake-out occurred then among regular IT companies (non-internet, office IT and office networks).
Looking back on the period it was only to be expected that such a shake-out would occur. Lot’s of companies had no viable business model at all and were just ‘burning’ millions a year without making any profits. It turned out that the ‘new economy’ could learn a lot from the regular good old companies that survived for decades selling their services and goods in an old fashioned store instead of online.
Life beyond the hype
So what do I think our future has to offer, after looking back at the past 10 years? Well I think we have only had a glimpse of what’s in store. Digitizing the future I would call it. The Internet has changed so much. Together with it telecom (mobile phones to be exact) has changed our life as well. In ’95 there were less than 500.000 people in Holland that owned a GSM cell phone. Now it’s estimated that there is 1.2 cell phones in every Dutch family: a whopping 6-8 million phones! In less than 10 years!
MP3 and DVD have changed the way we enjoy entertainment as well. Computers are a common household item. TV is rapidly becoming digital, opening up new ways we watch it: on-demand with TiVo. Podcasting is a new phenomenon and Blogging (like I’m doing right here) is a new cultural thing. Countries that are not so democratic (like China and some Islamic countries) are (still) struggling with the fact that Internet leaks in knowledge and information they rather would not see public.
Regular printed media are struggling with the business model of online publishing. Information is becoming rapidly available and almost always it’s free. Why bother paying for a newspaper if you can find everything for free? Why buying an encyclopedia if you can use Wikipedia? Why use print if you can have a digital paper? For telecom providers there is a revolution called VOIP, enabling people to make free calls using the Internet – even from PC to regular phones for free (like with VoipBuster). Also the PC is turning almost into a TV; you can watch webcams and broadcasts from everywhere.
Mobile phones with photo and video capabilities were a new thing. Now they also have GPS and MP3 players onboard. There is a whole convergence going on between several machines that you had to use separate before, but now become one. It is so interesting to see how everything merges and creates new ways of enjoying things.
Like I said in the first paragraph: I can not imagine my life without technology!
I am very excited to see what the next 10 years have in store for us. How will all the new technology influence us and our daily lives?
Which leads me to the conclusion: “you ain’t seen nothing yet!”