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| A world map colored to show the level of Internet penetration (number of Internet users as a percentage of a country's population). (Source) |
- The UK and Scandinavia are very connected, close to 100%.
- Western Europe and Canada are more connected than the USA
- As are Japan and the Republic of Korea
- Argentina, Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia are as connected as the USA.
- No surprise that some of the poorer regions on earth are barely connected, the African continent jumps out, with one exception ...
- ... Nigeria. Not as connected as the USA, but better than the rest of the African continent, but I suppose all that money the Nigerian prince supposedly has has to be spent on something, I mean he can't get it out of the country, can he?
When I was nobbut a lad, there was no Internet, heck, we had a party line with a rotary dial phone. Seeing as how most of the folks who come here have been around a while, no need to explain any of those things. Hey, if a millennial wanders in, they can always "Google" it. (More formally, "perform a search of the Internet using one of the more popular browsers available. Google has come to mean an Internet search much the same way the brand name "Kleenex" means an arbitrary tissue, as opposed to just saying "tissue.")
When I first got into computers, at the ripe old age of 30, the Internet was in its infancy, heck, it was embryonic, I'm talking about ARPANET¹ of course. (Okay wise guys at work², I was 30 in 1983 when I started my sophomore year of college, after an 11 year break from my freshman year. I didn't start college in 1883, geez.)
In college I could actually "talk" to the computers at school via a dial-up modem. Pretty wild, but it drove The Missus Herself nuts, I had wires and cables strung all over the place in our tiny apartment. It was easier just to drive down to the computer lab, even if one had to wait occasionally for a terminal to be available.
Looking back on things, I realize how primitive it all seems now. Hell, my smart phone has a lot more computing power than those early computers.
And we use them to "tweet."
Hhmm, all that technology seems wasted on we humans.
Sorry I'm not more chatty today, failed to get into the endodontist on Monday. The tooth flares up every now and then, so I've got that going for me. If pain is "weakness leaving the body," I am one strong dude ...
But I don't believe Nietzsche, not for one second.³
Well, maybe a little ...
¹ Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).
² One or two of my colleagues at work actually make it here accidentally from time to time, chasing a link from Facebook.
³ Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens - Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker. (Out of life’s school of war - What does not kill me makes me stronger.)
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Except for bears. BEARS KILL YOU!!!
ReplyDelete🤣🤣🤣
DeleteSarge, I lag you by a stretch (we had one and only one rotary dial phone in the house, but no party line - and a phone cord that would possibly stretch into the garage if you were having a conversation), but I remember when computers arrived. One of my friends from elementary/middle school's father got a TRS V1, with the black and white screen and the programs that loaded on via cassette tape. That thing was magical - so magical, I "made" the executive decision to skip Confirmation and play on it instead (which, of course, did not go well at all). I have worked on and had any number of computers since then (it took me years to convince my parents to get an Apple IIe, if for no other reason than I wanted a Word processor), but none of them ever had the magic of that first moment.
ReplyDeleteIt was at a time I could have chosen computers as a skill instead of the road I did follow. One wonders what that path might have looked like.
The path not taken ...
DeleteFunny thing: The first email that I sent was on the ARPANET (or was it DARPANET) in 1983. I often did my work on a terminal in a file room, there was a command "ARG+W" that was important for some reason. The standalone workstations were DECs with 8" floppies. The printers were either dot-matrix or daisywheel (the latter was so noisy it was in a sound-proofed box). An engineer in the next office had a Kaypro that he brought to and from work each day.
ReplyDeleteI bought my first computer in 1988, an IBM PS/2-25, no hard drive, dual 3/5" floppy drives with an HP printer. That set me back $2,500, the printer alone (ink-jet, printing at 2 ppm) was $700 or so. It had a blistering 2,400 baud internal modem. Compuserve was so expensive to use online that an automated program, TAPCIS, at $79, paid for itself in a month. And if you were doing anything online, you had to fight with the rest of the family over using the phone line, or get a dedicated line.
I ran an inflation calculator and just gasped... $5,800 in today's money! I used that for eight years and eventually put a 400Mb hard-drive in it for $400. Even without adjusting for inflation, that'd buy an 18-terabyte drive today. (I still have and use the Model M keyboard that came with it.)
My first laptop was a factory refurbished IBM Thinkpad in 1996 that cost $1,200. (You can get a really good one for the equivalent cost of two grand today.)
Kids today don't know how good they have it.
No, they don't! We practically were using flint knives and bearskins back in the early days of computing. (Something I believe Spock said in an episode of Star Trek.)
DeleteIn the old days, clove oil was used to deaden a bad tooth until the hoof and mouth doc could yank it out. Just don't get any on your gums!!!!
ReplyDeleteTwo men and an old woman set the stage for me. Mr. Drake, my Geometry teacher in high school brought his maxxed out TRS80 to school. "Gentlemen, if you are not computer literate in 20 years, you will be functionally illiterate." "Geometry is used by geometry teachers and students, but few others. We will have computer science in this class on MT-TF and Geometry on Wednesday going forward." My dad, "son, knowing how to type is a great skill. It got me out of guard duty when I was in the Army. Learn how to type, you never know if you'll get drafted or not." Mrs. Kramp said, "if you are going to be on the mission field, you will need to know how carpentry, electrical, plumbing, mechanics... If a job comes to you, do it. God may be preparing you for the future."
Between those two men and Mrs. Kramp, I learned to type, program in basic and keep as current as I could in computer science... Until I got in college to finish my degree. Then it was a micro-vax, cobol, fortran, a 300 baud modem the handset fit into, all the way to now. I just finished getting a CNC plasma table operating for a friend. Mechanical issues, electrical and data were pretty straight forward. It's pretty amazing what piques our interest and sets us on a path. Like TB said.
Ya never know where life's going to take you, it pays to pay attention!
DeleteI agree with Clove Oil. Much more effective than the over-the-counter numbing stuffs.
DeleteI don't touch the stuff, it doesn't do anything for me.
DeleteI don toush the schtuff.... doesnnn't do antythin fer me..... *hic*
Delete🤣
DeleteIn a pinch ground cloves from the wife's spice rack work better than nothing. Place heavily on a cotton ball and put the cotton ball (spice side toward the tooth) against the problem spot. If you use pure clove oil, be sure to dilute it in a carrier oil or it will be too strong and will irritate your mouth. Dilution instructions available if you search for them.
DeleteThe problem spot is inside the tooth, at the root. Can't reach it.
DeleteI am from the time before dial phones. We had a 2 party line, you picked up the receiver and if no one was talking the operator said "number please", which was a formality as half the time we used to speak the name of who we were calling. Being Bristol, nicknames were good enough. Our number was 897-M. To report a fire you would say something like "We have a fire at (address). One engine can probably handle it", or for major blazes "Need a General Alarm at (address)". The operator would sound the siren at the nearest station for a small fire or call the boiler room at the rubber works where the boilerman would sound the BIG siren followed by a number code on the factory whistle. The police dept. got radios about 1950 and the fire dept. shortly thereafter. We have upgraded exponentially since then, and the Fire dept. ,while remaining all volunteer except the chief and training officer, now has an ISO rating of 3. There are only 9 paid departments in the state with an equal or higher rating. We went on the internet in 1994 with "America on Hold". Old Guns
ReplyDeleteNow that's old school! 😁
DeleteAt least we had advanced beyond magneto crank phones. OG
DeleteHahaha!
DeleteThe first program I wrote was on punch cards. I got a computer (VZ-100) in 1982. While I was in the Navy's Delayed Entry Program there was a Career Fair at the local Mall. My Mother worked at the Mall and arranged for me to be able to borrow a 25 inch color TV (RCA). I had the recruiters figure out the message that they wanted to send and then used a series of "print" statements and loops to have it come up on the screen for a bit and then refresh and the next part came up. It blew people's minds. There was a letter of commendation from the MEPS CO that took a while to catch up. When it did I was four months out of Boot Camp and was able to take the Third Class Exam. My last two years of school I did computers and Drafting. My Father wasn't too impressed. He said that if it didn't put clothes on your back and food on the table it wasn't worth doing. Now I do 3D CAD design and modeling. I make a pretty god living.
ReplyDeleteAh the old "put clothes on your back and food on the table" argument. Makes sense, but once you have a trade, then you have room for hobbies. But yeah, first things first.
DeleteFrom a UK perspective we got our first land line in the late 60's. You had to apply to the Post Office for a phone and they would eventually come and install one for you. It got a bit better in the 80's when the old post office had to get more competitive. My school got its first electronic calculator in 1975. It could add, subtract and multiply and that was about it, it was also the size of a shoebox. As an aside the younger brother of a schoolfriend joined Microsoft in the early 80's and moved to the USA from the UK. He did rather well out of it. I eventually joined the police. To say that the police hierarchy were resistant to technology when I joined in the mid 70's would be an understatement- WW2 era teleprinters in use until the early 80's, carbon paper and manual typewriters the norm (the London Met police were still trying to source manual typewriters deep into the mid 80's). In fairness a lot of technological change was, in my opinion, held up by governments of varying political persuasion. The met police went on to a computerized command and control system in the early 1980's that was based on an airline reservation system that was obsolete then. It was still being used when I retired in '08. I'm not sure what the system that is being used now is but bear in mind in 2008 some brainbox in the government came up with the idea of letting overseas companies bid to run the 999 (911) system. I think discussions are still going on now as some think it's not a good idea to hand over a vital chunk of critical infrastructure to a foreign company (would you give Huawei the option to turn off emergency services radio?)
ReplyDeleteStill, compared to what we had available in the 50's and 60's much of today's tech is basically magic to me.
Retired
Letting any outside organization control a government function is an inherently bad idea. No doubt some bean counter will point to a "cost savings" and the bureaucrat responsible for that funding will jump all over it.
DeleteBut yeah, "magic." Imagine what the next century will be like. That could be amazing or it could be a nightmare.
I now have grandchildren, I wonder what nightmares their parents will have to negotiate.... we only had to deal with mobile phones not a 24/7/365 digital onslaught.
DeleteRetired
That onslaught is what's mucking everything up. Filling the void with useless information and made up news. It's bothersome to say the least.
DeleteThe map is wrong. If you go to the source you reference, there's a note saying that it was created by Sumdood based on data from here:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users
That page has the USA listed at over 95%, not 70-79%.
Not wrong per se, but out of date. The other map is more accurate but poorly done from a graphics point of view. But presenting data wasn't really the point here.
DeleteIf Borepatch is correct, it would actually surprise me. Because a good portion of the US is on urine-lacking high-speed access, which is why SpaceX's Starlink was designed to fix. There are still basically crappy almost dialup services available in most rural areas. You only get fiber or T1 or high-speed in areas that have been upgraded, and podunk ex-mining town in middle of West EastBumSomething tends not to have high-speed access.
ReplyDeleteIt's something that Doc from The Whiteboard complains regularly about when someone on one of the discussion boards he's on suggests doing this or that via computer. To him, high speed ends somewhere like 500 yards from where he is, and he doesn't have the scratch to pay for the additional yardage as where he is, Kenai AK, they apparently charge by the micron for cable and installation. Or something.
Access to High Speed is, as I said, an issue. It's an issue even to the surrounding non-bedroom community/suburb areas (think poor Florida pseudo-Cracker hicksville type area) that are found between the towns and cities in my area.
Again, it's the stated purpose of Starlink, and it is a factor in SpaceX choosing to provide their service to someone. Ifn you've got great service, you are low on the list of getting it. Live in a mountain redoubt semi- or fully- off-grid, that's who they are aiming it at. Like some airsmith/machinist Doc dude in Kenai, once he gets the scratch for it.
Not to mention which, all maps like that are created by Sumdood. Usually using someone else's (not always accurate) data. Again, presenting data wasn't the point of the post.
DeleteGeez ...
Okay, you expected a bunch of pedantic OCD sufferers to not jump on the 'map is somewhat incorrect made by sumdood' thingy? Have you looked in a mirror lately?
DeleteI mean, we're the type of people that actually do correct grammar and punctuation in someone's saliva-froth filled rant-o-the-day, so, yes, we'll grab onto someting not quite right like a rat-terrier with an actual rat.
Seriously, we aren't quite right here. Which is what makes the Chant so darned great.
😁
DeleteI was looking at the China part of the internet map and wondered about all the stories I've heard about "having" to use a smartphone to show your "social credit score" get on a bus or even take part in society, etc.
ReplyDeleteMakes me wonder...
Being on the country's intranet (I suppose) is different from being on the Internet, aka the World Wide Web.
DeleteI know of some US companies where everyone is on the company's intranet, but nobody is on the Internet. For various reasons, most having to do with control.
Even worse, having to use a ChiCom manufactured smart phone (that tracks one's every movement) to show one's social credit score... Why, it's almost like the ChiComs are a totalitarian dictatorship or something...
DeleteHard to believe, innit?
DeleteI knew of a law firm that had an intranet. If you wanted to do email or research, you had to go to the computer room. There was no connection between the intranet and the internet.
DeleteThey were ahead of their time.
"Seeing as how most of the folks who come here have been around a while," Are you sayin' I'm old???
ReplyDeleteWell, I guess you're right. I remember by teenage daughter's angst because I kept the phone line tied up with my 300 Baud modem and monochrome terminal so I could work on weekends from home, connected to the PDP-11 system at work.
Don't look at it as "old," think "experienced."
Delete(But yeah man, we're old ...)
I was a little surprised that the US is only in the 70% range, but there are a lot of very rural and poor areas in this country, much of it in Alaska I suppose. I think I heard that the Navajo Nation is also extremely limited on not only internet but some of the basic infrastructure that the rest of the nation has, like electricity plumbing and water.
ReplyDeleteI guess there's a more up to date map out there, but I don't consider having dial-up, or some slow speed ancient tech out in the back woods to be "connected." My gut tells me it's more than 70% but 95% is a bit of a reach. My Mom, for instance, could have Internet but doesn't want it. A lot of the older generation are the same.
DeleteI remember the time my granddaughter went into the garage and found my Snoopy and Woodstock rotary dial phone. She had no idea what it was until I explained it to her. At that point she wanted to use the rotary dial to call her father and she was so excited telling him that she was calling from a rotary dial phone! And in the first Gulf war in the desert, when our electronic shop hacked the mil-spec connector on the back of the KY 68 secure phone and set up an rs232 data port to a computer and we actually had a bulletin board with which the entire battalion could communicate! Ah, the good old days. :-)
ReplyDelete- Barry
Overcome, improvise, adapt!
DeleteIIRC without looking it up I think the Internet started not with Al Gore, but with the DoD in the mid 50s. As a way of making communications unbreakable in the event of a nuclear war. Then, slowly, universities began to connect.
ReplyDeleteI can remember in the early 80s belonging to several. BBSes – That’s bulletin board system for you millennials – and the real hard core us wrote our own code for the server.
People would dial in one at a time and leave their comments in various “rooms“ which were nothing more than directories - and then the next person would dial in. Sometimes while tryinkg to access the server you would be met with an hour’s worth of busy signals. And if you were really hot stuff you had multiple lines. Dedicated land lines to allow people to dial in.
I never used a 300 BPS modem but started with a 1200 BPS and when I went to 2400 I thought I’d gone to town. And then when the 14,400 came out WOW!
I'm mystified as to why people want to get Alexa or what’s the Google equivalent? I’ll be damned if I want the world to know everything I’m saying in the house.
And I use a light switch to turn the lights off and on.
When it comes to China I thought that came to my mind is it at first blush one would think the Internet with democratize them but they’ve made an art form out of censorship with a lot of help from US companies like Cisco.
I guess the jury still out on that (if the Net will Democratize China).
The Internet really reached critical mass with the invention of the worldwide Web which I believe was from a Cambridge MIT scientist. Combine that with a browser that was Netscape.
Back in the 90s I thought I would really help my business by getting a domain name and a web presence.
IIRC I had about three inquiries in five years but the search mechanisms were pretty crude. Remember Alta Vista? Yahoo? You do a search and get 100 hits with maybe two or three relevant. Then you had to sift through all the chaff to find a few grains of wheat.
Then 2 Stanford graduates tried to pedal their fancy search program to the established companies like Altavista and nobody was interested.
Because after all they all had search algorithms and weren’t they just fine? They never really ask the users apparently.
Undaunted are two heroes decided to have lunch at Buck’s restaurant in Woodside and decided right there to start a company called Google.
And when I decided to leave the web in the 90s I made a big mistake by dropping the domain name which was wbco.com.
A pornography company picked it up and I had to change all of my business cards.
Last time I checked an Ohio radio station picked it up where I presume it will remain
That’s something that bugs me about domain names. That people can pick them up and then just hold them hostage for extortionary rates.
Nobody has really used Neptunuslex since Lex died and yet somebody has held it for years. For a ransom like sales price. They know how much traffic it did generate all those years ago.
And as we all know there was only one Neptunus Lex.
It’ll be interesting to see where this takes us in another 10 or 20 years if we’re still around.
If any of you are interested in computers and happen to find yourselves in the bay area I really recommend that computer history museum.
It’s in Mountain View and I believe just up the street from where Google started.
👍
DeleteSorry for the run-on mass of text above. For some reason, blogger has it out for me. Several times in the last few days it lost my text - I learned to copy it to the clipboard before posting here - I put it to Word (with paragraph spaces!) - copied it back here on the desktop and what you see is what it gave me ;-)
ReplyDeleteIt happens.
DeleteBuck and I used to try to outdo each other with really really long strings of words that looked kind like writing. I remember all that and more. I remember back in the early days of SIPRNET that Alta Vista was THE ONLY search engine. That's OK. I could never get mosaic to work on my 1200, 2400, 28.8 or 56k modems. I prefer the silence of the quiet broadband connections. Blogger's been hating me for years now and keeps trying to force me to use html, Damn Them!
DeleteWhen I worked at Fermilab in the 1970's, we had a T1 line line to Argonne National Laboratory, which was one of the ARPANET nodes.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in college in the early 80's, as a sophomore, we had to take a computer course as one of our "electives" for the nursing program...yes, they dictated ALL of our courses for the first 3 years at the program I was in...so I learned Fortran so I could learn to program so I could be able to use computers when they squeezed into healthcare. Which happened about 3o years later when just about everyone had forgotten about Fortran and waiting in the computer for a free terminal with fingers crossed to see if my cards would be accepted and run the program we had been assigned to write.
ReplyDeleteDad bought an Apple when I was in high school--mid 70's? It had a very cool little gnome miner dude for a fun program in it. But when I went off to College I went with a Smith-Corona non-electric typewriter on which I typed not only my papers but a bunch of other folks' as well for a price...gas wasn't expensive, but when I was broke, I could knock out a couple of thesis papers and make enough to be able to drive the 80 miles home.
Brother...am I old!!!
Nah. You are just about the right vintage! I typed a lot for folks too. Mine was a Underwood.
DeleteI took Turbo Pascal in '89, and the last several assignments were in COBOL and FORTRAN. Self taught, no help. I burned a path from Computer Science to the Library and got the next to the last books on the shelf about them. I was really lucky...
Suz - Sounds like you did well!
DeleteSTxAR - COBOL was actually the language which we programmed the Military Airspace Management System, a bit cumbersome but it got the job done. Never used FORTRAN for work, have used Ada, C, C++, JOVIAL, and the odd bit of assembler here and there.
DeleteAll things being even, I'd rather a system than code it.
(Don McCollor)...(Still plodding through Apollo Flight Journals). On Apollo 14, Housten noted that the abort bit had been set on the LM DSKY (with the corresponding shielded abort switch off). Tapping changed the bit off. Apparently, a solder drop was floating around and shorting the switch. If the short occurred during powered lunar decent, the LM ascent stage would automatically separate and burn back to lunar orbit. The MIT programmers had 4-6 hours to come up with a fix (on a 3packed 2kb computer programming on the metal) to ignore the abort switch reading, ensure the LM could abort if necessary, make sure that no other system would be bitten in the behind from the changes, and radio it up to the crew. Altering code (on the fly so to speak) leaves one sweating with apprehension. It worked...
ReplyDeleteYeah, not for the faint of heart!
DeleteI was the first student at Tech, not working in the Computer Center, to sit down at a computer and enter a program by hand. The computer was bigger than the desk I'm sitting at writing this, by a bunch. BASIC was the language (I think) which made my COBOL and FORTRAN skills worthless. I'd had a bear of a time getting through Assembler (legitimately a D, the instructor took pity and gave me a 70.00000000000000. Good enough. My Master's thesis was to build a program which would optimize scheduling in a Job Shop where each step in a given Job was unique and may or may not be required in a given order. I finished that project on 1 March 1978, took my Written's on 2 March, Orals on 3 March and reported to Pilot training the next day.
ReplyDeletePilot Training was easy at that point.
(Don McCollor) BZ Juvat! Wondering how you approached the problem? This is at a higher programming level...
Deletejuvat - What Don said.
DeleteDon - That would be an interesting problem.
DeleteThe only reason I took typing the first semester of my senior year in high school (fall of 1971) was because I saw the computer age coming. One of the best decisions I ever made. There were only three of us males in the class of around 25. That made for nice scenery.
ReplyDeleteI was using a C-64 computer for word processing, spreadsheet, and database in a business setting in the early to mid 80s before the IBM-PC hit the market. Also used it to create several sound effects for use by the TV station where I worked. I added email shortly after the old MCI Mail system came online. My first IBM compatible was a turbo-XT clone with one of the very first available 40 Meg hard drives. Paid around $1,300 at Sears. Then I added RAM chips to the motherboard which had sockets for extended memory to bring it up to a full megabyte of memory instead of just 640 KB.
Ah yes, the old XT-clone, had one myself. A good machine it was.
DeleteAround about 1958 I took a tour of NAVSTANPT with a youth group which included the Naval Supply Center computer building. It was a dedicated building for the computer. No transistors, all vacuum tubes. It was very large, I don't remember the dimensions. The data was stored on 12 inch diameter magnetic discs which were accessed by a modified Wurlitzer jukebox. That was what made the biggest impression on a bunch of 16-17 year old boys. I turned 18 the following year in Co. 253, Great Lakes Recruit Training Command. Old Guns
ReplyDelete