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'A computer network called internet'

Broadcast Date: Oct. 8, 1993

The internet is no longer just for nerds. With some 15 million users across the planet, the global online network is being used to discuss everything from science to sex, murder trials to recipes. As we see in this clip, the media is playing catch up. No longer merely a science story, the internet is described as a "phenomenon," a "revolution," and "modulated anarchy." Bill Cameron looks at the internet's cultural impact.

'A computer network called internet'

• Many people confuse the terms "internet" and "web." The internet is the world's system of networked computers, and can be accessed in many ways. One of them is through hypertext transfer protocol on the World Wide Web, which allows users to browse web pages containing text, graphics and hyperlinks. Other methods of accessing the internet include e-mail, file transfer protocol (FTP), peer-to-peer, and older systems with names like Gopher and Archie.

• Archie was created in 1989 at Montreal's McGill University, by a team lead by Peter Deutsch. It was one of the first systems built to catalogue the internet, by accessing, listing and indexing FTP sites. Deutsch said the name Archie was short for Archiver, but others felt it recalled the famous comic strip (later systems were given names like Veronica and Jughead; Deutsch was disgusted).

• In an online article called "The World Wide Web: A Very Short Personal History," web inventor Tim Berners-Lee describes the goals of the web this way:
"The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished."

• "There was a second part of the dream, too," Berners-Lee continued, "dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together."

• In the early 1990s, consumer access to the internet was mainly through large commercial bulletin board systems such as America Online, Compuserve, GEnie, Prodigy and Delphi. These systems carried their own content and also provided access to the internet. Some of these still exist as internet service providers.

• Symbols constructed using punctuation to express emotions, as seen in this CBC Television clip, are called "emoticons" or "smilies." These keyboard characters, in place of facial expressions, help establish a tone that can be otherwise lost or misconstrued with electronic communication. They are always viewed sideways. Computeruser.com has a good list of examples.

'A computer network called internet'

Medium: Television

Program: Prime Time News

Broadcast Date: Oct. 8, 1993

Guest(s): John Allen

Host: Peter Mansbridge
Reporter: Bill Cameron

Duration: 6:22

Last updated:
Oct. 27, 2008