Unless you were born prior to the early 1990s, you probably don’t remember a world without the internet. The internet has become so ubiquitous that most of us cannot imagine life without it. But the internet did not always exist as we know it. There was once something else that wasn’t completely dissimilar to the modern internet in its function.
Wired contributor Kevin Driscoll recently put together a pretty in-depth piece discussing the internet before the internet of today. It really was a thing. It was a quite different thing in some respects, but also similar to the modern internet in other ways. In simple terms, the pre-internet internet was a collection of USENET and bulletin board (BBS) systems.
ARPANET Came Later
Driscoll started his piece by lamenting the fact that most discussions of the internet’s history begin with a military application known as ARPANET. As the story goes, what we now call the internet was birthed by ARPANET being made public by the U.S. military. That is true to a certain degree.
But it turns out that ARPANET came later. Before it, there were untold numbers of smaller, more isolated computer networks on which users shared information. Some of those systems were USENET systems developed in the late 1970s and early eighties. Others were BBS environments. In both cases, users relied on dial-up modems to connect their computers with other computers.
Both USENET and BBS environments allowed users to exchange data. During those early days, most of that data consisted of text-based conversations and code swaps. Graphics were limited by technological capabilities. USENET and BBS platforms were places to exchange ideas. You could say that they were the precursor to modern social media.
The Modern internet
Before ARPANET birthed the public internet as we know it, groups of computer users were still connecting. But they were not connecting online in the same sense that we do today. Therein lies the big difference. Driscoll makes a particularly good point by explaining what existed before ARPANET and the public internet. But USENET and BBS systems were closed systems. Not only that, but they also weren’t interconnected. So those early systems really were not the same thing as ARPANET.
ARPANET was a military system of network computers capable of swapping data around the globe. Connected computers were always on. Moreover, new computers could be added to the system at will – without using a dial-up modem and a public phone line.
When the public internet finally became a thing, users had to get online with a dial-up modem and a phone line. The technology of the day did not allow for very fast speeds at the local level, despite the fact that the internet itself was comparatively faster. But as things evolved, technology and speeds both improved.
A Hybrid System
An honest look at what was before the internet leads to the conclusion that the modern system is a hybrid system. Modern internet users can get online using wired broadband, satellite, or 4G wireless service. According to Houston-based Blazing Hog, there are even some people in rural areas still using DSL and dial-up.
Regardless, our hybrid model consists of technology birthed by ARPANET and the social component birthed by USENET and BBS platforms. We get the best of both worlds in a modern internet that is blazingly fast, incredibly robust, and evolving faster than most of us can keep up with.
Yes, there was an internet of sorts before ARPANET. And those early adopters of bulletin boards and USENET systems set the stage for making the public internet a social platform.