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Earendil

macrumors 68000
Oct 27, 2003
1,599
89
Washington
•Software updates.

•Streaming/updates for certain apps.

•Multiplayer games that you have a copy of on your hard disk.

---

Would you still pay for and/or use the internet?

I know you later went on the expand the idea, but your initial list of what's left is sadly small.
I'd pay for the "internet" if only to get my email.
In addition to your list, I also use it for:
1. Games
2. FTP access
3. Chat Clients
4. email
5. Work Meetings
6. Skype
7. Dedicated IP Phones (at work)
8. Any one of a couple dozen "App for that" applications on my phone that use the internet, but not the world wide web.

Basically, the only thing I consistently use the WWW for, is a few forums (like this one), and quick research/information gathering using google. The first of those could be replaced by usegroups.

In fact, if I break my internet time up as "WWW" and "non WWW" I'd say I spend 90% of it in "non WWW".

So yes, I'd pay for internet if the WWW side disappeared :)
 

KnightWRX

macrumors Pentium
Jan 28, 2009
15,046
4
Quebec, Canada
The Internet has been around a lot longer than web browsers have been. I should say *graphical* web browsers, because before there was Netscape, there was Lynx.

Actually, the graphical web browser predates the text web browser, WorldWideWeb being the first one :

2312211279_29a99c2d9b.jpg


Your first sentence was bang on your second one was iffy, the Internet dates back to 1969, back when it was a 4 node cluster called ARPANET while the Web Browser dates back to a 1989 proposal by Sir Tim-Berners Lee. So the Internet existed for about 20 years before the advent of Web Browsers and the Web.
 

elppa

macrumors 68040
Nov 26, 2003
3,233
151
The Internet has been around a lot longer than web browsers have been. I should say *graphical* web browsers, because before there was Netscape, there was Lynx.

The very first web browser (which was developed before Lynx) was in fact a *graphical* web browser. It was written in Objective-C by Tim Berners Lee using frameworks which Apple today call Cocoa.

800px-WorldWideWeb_screenshot.gif


Actually, the graphical web browser predates the text web browser, WorldWideWeb being the first one:
Sorry, I started replying and then came back and clicked post before checking the thread.
 

bradl

macrumors 603
Jun 16, 2008
5,952
17,447
IIRC, AOL is the direct descendant of QuantumLink, which, at the beginning, was a Commodore 64-specific service (I was a member for about a year, but always found that local BBS's had more life in them than the commercial services did.)

Didn't AOL spin up from Promenade in the early 90s, or did was Promenade only a 386/486-based thick client at that time?

The Internet has been around a lot longer than web browsers have been. I should say *graphical* web browsers, because before there was Netscape, there was Lynx.

Before Netscape, was NSCA Mosaic. IIRC, Mosaic -> Lynx -> Netscape. Netscape formed when the developers of NCSA Mosaic graduated from UIUC.

what's scary, is that I still have the install programs on floppy somewhere around here. What's scarier, is that all of them are still publicly available!

Gopher was the "web browsing" of the pre-Netscape days. I used that program a LOT.

Agreed. Gopher was it. Led me to many a Freenet (Cleveland FreeNet, Seattle Freenet, Columbia Freenet, and a couple overseas).

Elm and Pine were two popular e-mail clients (remember that most everything on the Internet was through a UNIX shell back then - they didn't come out with SLIP or PPP until the 90's.)

Agreed. I lived by Elm.. but it had to be PGP compliant. ;)

And of course the "BBS" of the Internet was USENET...it's still around, but I don't think it's nearly as popular as it once was.

So if browsers went away tomorrow, we'd still have the Internet, it just wouldn't be quite as user friendly as it is now.

oh yeah. I still used Unix-based/CLI clients. Mutt is my email program; most of my non-browser downloading is done by NcFTP, TIN is my newsreader, Tinyfugue for any Talkers I may go back to, and BitchX for the IRC client.


The very first web browser (which was developed before Lynx) was in fact a *graphical* web browser. It was written in Objective-C by Tim Berners Lee using frameworks which Apple today call Cocoa.

Sorry, I started replying and then came back and clicked post before checking the thread.

Did that predate Mosaic? I honestly can't remember since it was written in C++ and Objective C at the time..

BL.
 

KnightWRX

macrumors Pentium
Jan 28, 2009
15,046
4
Quebec, Canada
Did that predate Mosaic? I honestly can't remember since it was written in C++ and Objective C at the time..

Maybe you should have checked the thread first before posting then (or seeing how this is an Internet forum, instead of not remembering, you could have looked it up yourself) :

Actually, the graphical web browser predates the text web browser, WorldWideWeb being the first one :

The very first web browser (which was developed before Lynx) was in fact a *graphical* web browser. It was written in Objective-C by Tim Berners Lee using frameworks which Apple today call Cocoa.

Do you know who Sir Tim-Berners Lee is ? He's the guy that invented the web. HyperText Markup Language, Hypermedia, HyperText Transfer Protocol, his work culminating into WorldWideWeb, the first web browser and CERN httpd, the first web server, which all ran on his NeXT Computer (that's before the NeXT cube kids).

Oh, there was porn in the pre-web days, but it was all ASCII pictures.

GIF pre-dates the web, having been introduced by Compuserv in 1987 and if you were around in those days (late 80s, early 90s), you'd know GIF was one of the defacto standards for porn pictures.
 

emw

macrumors G4
Aug 2, 2004
11,172
0
Oh, there was porn in the pre-web days, but it was all ASCII pictures.
:D

GIF pre-dates the web, having been introduced by Compuserv in 1987 and if you were around in those days (late 80s, early 90s), you'd know GIF was one of the defacto standards for porn pictures.
Nothing like downloading grainy GIF pictures from a BBS over a 9600 baud modem. Not that I've ever done such a thing.

Do you know who Sir Tim-Berners Lee is ? He's the guy that invented the web. HyperText Markup Language, Hypermedia, HyperText Transfer Protocol, his work culminating into WorldWideWeb, the first web browser and CERN httpd, the first web server, which all ran on his NeXT Computer (that's before the NeXT cube kids).
So he knows Al Gore, then? ;)
 

wildcat90

macrumors member
Jun 17, 2009
32
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Blew my mind...

I would still use the Internet, as I use Usenet and other Internet applications
 

notjustjay

macrumors 603
Sep 19, 2003
6,056
167
Canada, eh?
I remember being on the internet long before I was browsing the web using Mosaic (and then Netscape after that). I used to browse Usenet groups all the time, got my files from anonymous FTP servers, and telnetted to a lot of MUD servers. Read my email using pine. My preferred text editor is still pico. :D

Even while I was using the "modern" web I still preferred my text shell for a lot of things. I was reading Usenet groups using "tin" right up until sometime in 2004 or so.
 

Ttownbeast

macrumors 65816
May 10, 2009
1,135
1
Oh, there was porn in the pre-web days, but it was all ASCII pictures.

The ASCII pics were what were displayable for most in the 80's but real down-loadable porn was even available through file sharing for computers that had monitors capable of rendering at least 32 colors even then. Even a ti/99 or a trs80 color with the right hardware could display decent quality stills on the screen that were not ASCII of course the scanners being used to digitize the images were monstrous and slow in comparison.
 
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