The Internet Revolution – History and Significance

Peter S Magnusson ♦ June 6, 2010 ♦ 1 Comment

Today I needed access to some old files. I had an old tar file from around 1998 that held several gigabytes of files. It came from large Unix servers, and for many years I had no easy access to it’s contents – Windows would cringe at trying to access the large number of files (43502 files, some very big and some with very long file names). Solaris, of course, could easily handle all of it (10 years earlier).

But now my main work horse is the new i7-based MacBook Pros – so again (10 years later) I am now working with 64-bit Unix on a proper file system with multiple processors. So today I pointed my laptop at this old set of files. Mac OS X had no problems at all, and Spotlight reindexed everything in a matter of minutes.

One of the fun things I found was a PowerPoint that I made in 1997. It’s from a presentation I was invited to hold at Svenska Dagbladet in February of that year. SvD was at the time one of Sweden’s two large national newspapers. There was a debate within SvD about how significant the Internet would be for print media. I was somewhat established in the space at the time, having written a number of articles in 1995 and 1996 and held a few invited talks on the overarching topic of the significance of the Internet. I had personal web pages from April 1993, and had one of the first (if not the first) columns in mainstream print media that was connected to a web page where readers could post comments (first such column was in October 1995).

Tomorrow I will be attending IJ-7 at Stanford, so I was curious as to how well my old observations on the impact on Media would pan out.

See for yourself! 🙂