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How big is the Internet

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by maxwell edison

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19.2 billion?

8.1 billion?

Bigger than a breadbox?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/technology/15search.html?ei=5090&en=f94199a293b0c97d&ex=1281758400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

Think about this. If someone told you 20 years ago that.....

..... a Google was feuding with a Yahoo .....

..... what would you have thought?

Do you Google?

No, I Yahoo.

Oooooooooookay.

28 replies

by dr dij

Sprint published a poster of all the internet connections, had a circle with all the destinations on the edges, and routers in middle. The huge # of straight lines all thru the circle came up looking like a bird in flight.

by jaqui

yahoo users are nothing but a bunch of yahoos. ;)

( that is actually the name of a gay group in toronto area..."Bunch of Yahoos" )

by guruofdos

A Yahoo (or Hooray Henry) is any scholar that attended Oxford or Cambridge University or went to a public (fee paying private school) like Eton.

In any typical English pub, a bunch of Yahoos can spoil a very pleasant evening's drinking in seconds flat! Much the same as in Toronto I would imagine!

by itgirli

How can something intangible be thought of in size? A google in hand is worth two yahoos in a bush? (That last one didn't even sound right.) Have you ever been asked "which internet?"? And I want to know who cares.

by gadgetgirl

I Ask Jeeves (mainly because I need UK-related answers!)

And I don't really care either. Like all other things, it has its good parts and its bad parts.

As long as the good outweigh the bad .....

GG

by dr dij

the Arpa Net connected just about every college in the US (and two in Britain, about 100 nodes total). We had to walk 5 miles each way in the snow (or take the intercampus bus) to a secure terminal to login to it.

None of this new-fangled 'Dialup' or 'Broadband'. There weren't any 'pictures' (html had not been invented yet). Used instant chat, didn't use email as not too many people to talk to.

We played Adventure and Zork after hours on MIT's Dec cluster, and learned math on Macsyma symbolic math system. It was slow compared to today but we thought it was fast!

The only mainframe around was a system-360 which we used with punch cards. Then they came out with credit card sized punch cards, and we were overjoyed! X-ray diffraction calculations could take 8 hours and we loved it!

A color display plus dec-system to render a 3-d protein could cost $50,000, and we'd have to program in Fortran, not this coffee-java-thang-language!

We wrote our lessons on a TRS-80 slate computer (with charcoal?) My first desktop computer had 64K of memory and I was happy, not like you young-uns with 2 gigs. Portable computers weight 30 pounds in a huge clamshell, and WE LIKED IT!

Think I'll totter off to the old -computer's museum now...

by bob in calgary

X.25 Packet switch stream, 300,1200 and 2400 baud modems and silent 700's with acoustic couplers. Reminds me of my days at plessey installing the stuff.

by dr dij

to fit on my desktop into one icon :)

And I did see an ad on TV that someone had surfed constantly and hit 'the end of the internet'

by guruofdos

I found the end, then fell off...took me six months to get back on again.

I am sat here holding a patch lead - the RJ45 looks like the end of the internet to me.

:-)

by generalist

I'd wonder why something that represents ten to the hundredth power was interacting with the humanish brutes from Gulliver's Travels.

That or wonder how long it would take a person to say 'yahoo!' ten to the hundredth times. (As opposed to 'whee' or 'yehaw'...)

by maxwell edison

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Good to see you back, my friend. I truly do hope all is well with you. So, when are you going to be in Colorado (God's country) so I can buy you a beer?

by m_a_r_k

it doesn't matter a helluva lot how many pages the search engines return. who's gonna sit around and sift through 4,110,000 Google hits for Britney Spears? (Hell, Google even returned 62,400 for somebody named Britney Speers (with 'ee')). I might try the first 20 or 30 on any search. After that you just get a bunch of repeats or just plain junk.

by maecuff

That "Wayback Machine" has come in handy a couple of times. And I didn't even need Mr. Peabody to use it..

by Member 25348569

Nice to know that the Internet can continue to run when the wires are down.

You don't know about RFC 1149? Please use your search engine of choice or current search engine hijack. (Surely not the latter on [b]this[/b] site!)

by dr dij

asked me about 5 years ago, "wouldn't it be simpler if there was just one phone company?"

Apparently he hadn't learned definition of word 'monopoly'.

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