@molly0xfff I don't know Chris Dixon from Adam, but jfc I just read the first few pages on Amazon and WOW tell me nobody is out there taking this knucklehead seriously !
@funcrunch@molly0xfff This was where I really fell out of my chair. This guy thinks the internet just kind of popped into existence in 1990 as a network resembling what we had in ~2010
I was thinking maybe he was too young to remember accurately what things were like in 1990 (I was 20 at the time). But then @molly0xfff wasn't even born then, and she's smart enough to know better.
In trying to find out Dixon's age, I found this Forbes interview where he says he's "been working full-time on the Internet really for 25 years as an entrepreneur and then investor" for whatever that's worth.
@funcrunch i wonder if that's actually the problem, like it was easy for HIM to get on the internet in 1990, so he assumes it was for everyone and doesn't bother to do much research on what the internet was like for other people because why would he need to, he was there!
Good point. Also, it's not that the Internet wasn't accessible to the public then; I remember using Gopher and email, etc. before then. It's the web in particular that certainly wasn't widely accessible until later that decade.
ETA: Although I also realize far fewer people even had home computers until much later.
ETA2: Actually Gopher came out after 1990; should have checked rather than trusting my own memory!
@funcrunch@molly0xfff The issue primarily was that there was no “front end” - the closest you had were BBS gateways to the internet “stuff” (usually USENet)
Once the web started catching on, the way I used to describe it to people was:
“ imagine somebody laid all the phone lines and communications lines we have and connected everyone throughout the world”
“And then one day someone invented the telephone - that’s what the web browser is”
@molly0xfff@funcrunch That can’t even be true for him. I remember coming into work in the early 90’s and browsing the entire World-Wide-Web(WWW), and I mean ALL of it, there were people maintaining lists of “what new web site popped up today” because you COULD maintain a list like that in your spare time. 😂
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