Can You Explain What Internet Is?
Here’s a video that can be enjoyed both by younger viewers and older viewers, but in very different ways.
This clip of The Today Show is apparently from January 1994. The hosts ponder over a new entity that seems to be cropping up all over the place, the strange and magical new Internet. If it’s not obvious, the person on the left is Katie Couric, the current anchor of The CBS Evening News.
The point of this is not to make fun of the hosts who, 17 years ago, could hardly have been expected to understand how ubiquitous the Internet would become in our lives. But the clip is intriguing as a frozen moment in time, recalling the days when you had to check the newspaper for movie listings and you had to buy stamps to mail a letter. Back then, the thought of someone like me writing something like this and having someone like you come here and read it would have been unthinkable.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going outside to do a video chat on my mobile phone.
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:15 am
I love stuff like this…It really is a very funny time capsule.
February 3rd, 2011 at 8:04 pm
Yeah, it’s fun to think about the first time you used each of the technologies we take so much for granted today.
The flip side of the coin is that, last year, I actually had to explain to a sixth-grade class what a “typewriter” was.