It was early 90s…very early. I was in Berkeley, not attending Cal but working at a high-tech company located next to the campus as a support engineer to help pay my student costs. A product manager if you will wanted to show us the first-ever browser, forums, etc. fully working with actual UI! It was rudimentary but it opened our jaws long and wide. That was the birth of all the modern browsers today. What a memory! Decades later I had the privilege to meet and greet (hand-shake + 1.15 mins of chat) Sir Tim Berners-Lee in person to share breakfast at a Privacy conference.
Life was very different then! It was full of hope and innovations seem to be rising as sure as the sun everyday from the west coast to the entire world! What we have today in computing industry are merely offsprings of the great minds of the time.
In this entry, let’s hear what “Internet” sounded like, and a few other sounds of birth! Few of us lucky enough to afford a modem, hooked up to a land-line, connected to a network card via low-bandwidth telephone cable to a PC (barely more powerful than today’s PoS terminals) had the luxury to listen to the sounds of connecting to the world from our dens…not dissimilar to the effect of getting a signal back from an orbiting satellite by the moon I imagine. What a fascinating time that was…only if we could make these head-spinning contraptions easier to use for everyone less techy down the road!
Click on the images below to hear each sound…
We are connected! How connecting to the Internet sounded:
We won’t talk about Windows Me or Vista today. Or, even tomorrow 😉