Significant moments in the internet's history

From software to hardware, breakthough to disaster, it all belongs here!

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battye
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garmabeaneth wrote:i have to admit i love online banking! sure is convienant!
And Paypal too. It's changed the way we buy.
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battye
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<pokesthelippyfish> microchip, email, instant messaging, napster, google, broadband, ebay, youtube, wiki, wifi
<scacricket001> Youtube, Google, Wikipedia, Napster, Broadband, Hotmail, Email, Myspace/Facebook, Paypal, Ebay
<scacricket001> that is my top 10
Of the list, which is I Love You Bug, Y2K Bug, Gmail, XP, Wi-Fi, Email, Instant Messaging, Myspace/Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, Napster, Ebay, Microchip Technology, Hotmail, Broadband, ARCHIVE.ORG, Linux, Skype/Voip, Paypal, IMDB, Online Banking, Internet Meme's, Internet Forums, IRC, what would your top 10 be?
CricketMX.com in 2022: Still the home of bat's, rat's and other farmyard animals!

"OK, life [as you chose to define it] repeats until there are no more lessons to be learned." - nrnoble (June 12, 2005)
"the new forum looks awesome, it's getting bigger & better" - p2p-sharing-rules (11 Jan, 2008)
"Looks like CMX is not only getting bigger...but, also getting better!!" - moongirl (14 Dec, 2007)
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battye
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I had an interesting discussion earlier:
<battye> out of curiosity, what do you think the most important internet moments are - from this list: I Love You Bug, Y2K Bug, Gmail, XP, Wi-Fi, Email, Instant Messaging, Myspace/Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, Napster, Ebay, Microchip Technology, Hotmail, Broadband, ARCHIVE.ORG, Linux, Skype/Voip, Paypal, IMDB, Online Banking, Internet Meme's, Internet Forums, IRC
<Ed_L> broadband
<battye> as #1?
<Ed_L> yes
<Highway_of_Life> Ed_L: done
<Ed_L> i wouldn't count microchips, archive.org, linux, imdb or memes as historic
<Ed_L> Highway_of_Life: thanks
<battye> I wouldn't either
<battye> although some people I talked to really put microchips up there
<Highway_of_Life> Broadband, battye
<Highway_of_Life> Google would be a close #2\
<battye> I thought Youtube was #1
<battye> I also put Google 2nd
<Ed_L> youtube is important as the poster boy of web 2.0, so it'd be 3 or 4
<Ed_L> IRC... yeah, more amazing it's lasted so long rather than a big bang kind of thing
<Highway_of_Life> I really didn't pay much attention to and hardly visited youtube until middle/late last year, I still don't visit it that often.
<battye> What about Napster
<Highway_of_Life> what about it?
<Ed_L> that would rank up there
<Highway_of_Life> I hardly know what Napster is. :P
<Ed_L> the grandfather of computer piracy :P
<battye> The first mainstream P2P client
<Highway_of_Life> eww and eww. :P
<battye> yum YUM!
<battye> lol
<Highway_of_Life> hehe
<battye> although in fairness, I think iTunes is becoming a more reliable medium
<Highway_of_Life> I used iTunes daily and often, but I've never purchased a single song or video off of iTunes
<Ed_L> gmail isn't significant. revolutionary in that it expanded the marked but it didn't really create anything new
<battye> Hotmail is more significant I think because it was the very first free webmail
<battye> well
<Ed_L> yeah
<battye> among the first
<battye> the first popular one anyway
<battye> I buy a lot of music on iTunes now
<Ed_L> XP for the same reason - in the desktop PC market it was highly significant, but internet wise nothing much happened
<battye> But if iTunes doesn't have it, P2P it is. Once criticism I have of iTunes is that it needs to expands its library to be more international
<Ed_L> you forgot the .com boom and bust
<Ed_L> that's where ebay, paypa, etc came from
<Highway_of_Life> eBay made a big impact early on. YouTube, Wikipedia and Google I group together as "Information delivery"
<battye> I agree with that
<Ed_L> yeah
<Ed_L> although youtube and wikipedia are both significant for their own, unique reasons
<battye> Does anyone here mind if I post the meat of this chat on my forum - there is a topic dedicated to it. I'll leave out the bertie bot bit though...
<Ed_L> hehe
<Ed_L> sure
<battye> HoL?
<Highway_of_Life> e-mail could be ranked pretty high, but we've had it so long it's easy to forget about it, or what kind of impact it made when we used to mail everything through snail mail.
<Highway_of_Life> battye: don't mind
<battye> Yeah, email really has changed the way we communicate
<battye> Cheers :)
<Ed_L> wifi is also important, but more communications rather than internet
<battye> How popular is Skype really?
<Ed_L> if that makes sense :P
<Highway_of_Life> Myspace, Facebook and even YouTube led the way for Social communication, they've had a big impact for friends to keep track of friends in weird ways.
<Ed_L> yeah, they really shifted the focus from the content to the user
<Highway_of_Life> Ed_L: yes... like XP, it's more hardware, outside of the internet... you could have and can do that with local networks
<Highway_of_Life> Skype broke the bonds of international voice communication. Enabling users to now phone a friend halfway across the world and not have to pay international phone fees.
<battye> Myspace would be much better if it wasn't for the shocking designs
<Highway_of_Life> Myspace would be much better if it was much better.
<battye> It had potential, but they blew it
<Ed_L> skype really was the first program to bring VoIP to the consumers
<battye> Yeah well I was going to say that too HoL, but didn't want to offend anyone here that uses it :P
<Highway_of_Life> they made some major mistakes like using ColdFusion... enabling users to post as much videos, pictures, and graphics effectively overloading your browser on some pages.
<Ed_L> i dunno, i think that a lot of the problems are people trying to represent Myspace as something it's not
<Highway_of_Life> and then you have the flood of self promotion and advertising, the mass "post" spam, and hordes of other issues that it brought us...
<Highway_of_Life> and then it defeated the purpose when everyone got in a race to see how many friends they could get...
<Ed_L> yeah it's got terrible designs and content, but it was never designed to bring together the great web designers and nobel prize winners
<Highway_of_Life> then your "friends" list was no longer made up of "friends"
<Highway_of_Life> so I think people started heading to sites like Facebook, and that brough it's popularity up, aside from it being open source, the ability for rapid and easy expansion, including ways developers were able to manipulate how facebook evolved. Unlike Myspace, the users now had a say in what they wanted.
<Highway_of_Life> they could install their own little widgets of information, and tried harder to make their friendslist only be "friends", this resulted in less mass advertising and self promotion than myspace, cleaner designs that were not overloaded with pictures, flash and video, plus designed using the PHP language made it faster and easier to browse than MySpace
<battye> It should not be a friends list, it should be a "friends" list ;)
<Highway_of_Life> it should really have three lists: "friends list" "acquaintance list" and "stranger (aka future friend) list"
<battye> lol
CricketMX.com in 2022: Still the home of bat's, rat's and other farmyard animals!

"OK, life [as you chose to define it] repeats until there are no more lessons to be learned." - nrnoble (June 12, 2005)
"the new forum looks awesome, it's getting bigger & better" - p2p-sharing-rules (11 Jan, 2008)
"Looks like CMX is not only getting bigger...but, also getting better!!" - moongirl (14 Dec, 2007)
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garmabeaneth
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woot! 2 of my ideas were in the top 10
Sometimes when you cry... no one sees your tears.
Sometimes when you are worried... no one sees your pain.
Sometimes when you are happy... no one sees your smile.
But fart just one damn time ...
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Layzie Bone
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my top 10 would have to be, this might take a while to think over, not something I'm pulling out of my hat...

1. Broadband / Highspeed Internet - agreed to that right from the get go, the ability to transfer 700 MB (or an 80 minute CD) over the internet in less than a half hour and send it to China or where ever is pretty amazing. Nothing much has changed in the last 10 years as far as what we do with the internet. Although I can say that all of our communities such as this one wouldn't have been possible as the software just to run the site (phpBB) (or it's equivalance) would not have been free and would not have been cheap. A lot of resources are avialable now that werent before. Does the world really benefit from the internet? depends on who you ask, yes and no. The fact that I dont have to work at it to send someone a message in Austrailia can be both good and bad.
2. Google - Google is like the internet in a book today, if you're not on google, you're not going anywhere. The problem with google today is that there are too many websites with the same thing. I can't find anything original anymore it seems, anything too specific wont give you good results, eventhough you know it's there.
3. Windows - Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows 95, and Windows 2000 are the most groundbreaking versions of Windows. Windows 95, the first 32-bit GUI, also brought the internet at ease, with a built in browser. Windows 98, a little embarrassing with it BSOD on CNN, but a lot of the things we use now like flash player, java, a lot of that stuff became a standard and has shaped Windows, and Internet Explorer and other browsers into what they are now. Windows XP seems to be like the masterpiece, the OS that got it all right. Windows XP has a stranglehold on the computer industry, I dont believe we've been suck on a version of Windows this long since Windows 98. XP was released like what 2001-2002, and it's been 6 years roughly?
4. Flash Player - No one mentioned flash? Flash today makes half of the webpages work, it's flexible and efficient, the trick is making the flash, ha spend about an hour coding a smiley face.
5. Live Streams - Remember back in the day when you wanted to listen to a radio station on the net and back then everyone is on dial-up, the buffering and buffering and the watery sound the music had with it, today most stations still have the watery effect, some on the other hand are "HD" and don't. Live streams are still "not live" as the stream is about 30 seconds old if not more just for the extra buffer.
6. P2P - Peer 2 Peer - Got to love it, and it's not going anywhere, the RIAA and MPAA can stomp out the big fires, but small private communities are always going to be around. Had I thought of this one sooner, probably would have been #5. I didn't get to enjoy the days of napster, i didn't get a computer till 2002, funny that I'm a technician today. WinMX, Limewire, Kazaa, and Bit Torrent, just a few flavors of p2p and it's past.
7. Instant Messaging - IM - To me it's just quicker than email. I mean how often do you compose an email in a "letter" format, just as much as we use proper spelling and abbreviation of words on IM....
8. PHP, ASP, Perl, SQL - These web platform languages and active content has changed a lot about websites in general, I find them overlooked. Intenet Explorer 4.0 wont even display Microsoft's website correctly today, if at all, most pages you get jibberish. PHP and MySQL, is like salt and pepper, it maes this site a breeze, imaging how many HTML pages it would take to recreate this site? Nevermind the fact that I can post to the site in realtime, just all the topics and posts and so on, it'd take forever. Small things make the difference.
9. Fiber Optic - Not avialable everywhere, but fiber is going to be the big change in the way we communicate period. TV, Phone, internet can all be done by fiber, due to it's incredible speed and reliability, it's light, there's not going to be much more to improve on other than what kind of light and the speed of the devices attached to the fiber. Nothing will get rid of latancy, as we are stuck with god's speed limit of light.
10. TCP-IP - Another one, this should be #1, without TCP-IP there would not be much of an internet, TCP-IP is the addressing system for computers on the internet, even in local area networks. Id say it was a big moment, and very critical. There are two standards of IP: IPv4, our normal IP, ranging from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, and the one address wanted more by anything 192.168.1.1. The newer IPv6, which uses a hexidecimal system, versus the decimal system. The whole reason in my mind that IPv6 exists is simply that IPv4 can only to a possible 4 billion addresses, which the more and more computers that are in use on the internet at some point we're going to run out of addresses. This problem is easily solved by IPv6, they just made it harder for the average guy to write down the IP address of a computer, I guess they dont want you to know :roll: Doesn't matter some nerdy kid, nerdier than me will crack it, happens all the time, although not too recently, hell people are still hacking. Bottom line is whether I find a bug or not, if I have the right credentials, whether it's you're finger, your hand, maybe your eyes, I'm getting in. Anyway, I better stop all this rambling, bottom line is think about the small things, the pieces that make it up.
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garmabeaneth
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not even a mention about java! and sorry battye.. but quicktime was left out as well lol
Sometimes when you cry... no one sees your tears.
Sometimes when you are worried... no one sees your pain.
Sometimes when you are happy... no one sees your smile.
But fart just one damn time ...
(¯`·._.·[GUEST 601]·._.·´¯)

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pokesthelippyfish
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Without the microchip, computers would still occupy huge warehouses... and this thread would be mootly non-existant. Put THAT in your Funk & Wagnall's, baby! And, I'll just wait while you all google Funk & Wagnall's.
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
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moongirl
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pokesthelippyfish wrote:Without the microchip, computers would still occupy huge warehouses... and this thread would be mootly non-existant. Put THAT in your Funk & Wagnall's, baby! And, I'll just wait while you all google Funk & Wagnall's.

I love that music!! Toots & The Funk & Wagnall's :wink:
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