Ian K TindaleThe Internet took a long time to make money
It’s hard to imagine now, here in mid 2020 I mean late 2025 that the internet and everything related to the internet wasn’t always the fast-forward money-making machine that it is now. An entire generation – and their young children – has now grown up with the impression that it is an entirely commercial process and is where money happens, and of course.
It’s hard to remember that for a very long time, no actual money was being made in the internet world, except perhaps by the tool sellers, but the general process of ‘getting the internet up and running’ was either loss-making or on the other hand, never intended to make any money at all and just coast along as some kind of idealised activity.
By the latter I point at the already established ‘shareware’ (soon to become ‘open-source’) movements, which at first hardly impacted the general public, allowed to grow in it’s own way, and was seemingly a good thing, but largely unstructured, often acting more as personal portfolios of skill level and apprentice pieces.
The internet at that stage was a sort of ‘super RS-232 network’ whereby you could communicate with impressive reach, using early email, early usenet, and also send receive and deposit small files, nothing big or important, but you could. None of it had any pretence of making money, or had anything to do with money at all in fact. It was just a side-activity, not your job, just a thing you tucked in alongside a job.
Soon came a new thing on the internet, The World Wide Web, taking a long time to make any impact at all, then suddenly catching on. Along the way groups of people thought it was going to go in this direction or that direction, we have to do this or do that, but consequently for most people involved this also didn’t make any money at all. It lost a spectacular lot money for some groups of people. In a few cases a few people won the lottery but had no idea how they won (like any lottery) but became revered for their advice anyway. But overall, it wasn’t a money-making concern. It wasn’t at all. For a very long time. Because nobody really knew how.
What it took was to pervert the original notion of the World Wide Web so that the ‘interconnected web of sites’ was demolished, no site would in fact connect to any other (or risk losing customers), and the opposite of a web was implemented, each site became a trap, each site denied the existence of the rest of the web, each site became a landlord and you, the user, is now the serf. That’s now the commercial reality, allowing them to chisel away at extracting money in various ways – but we must remember that for a very long time around the turn of the century (plus and minus about a decade) it wasn’t like this at all, it had real difficulty being commercial in any viable way.
It’s hard to imagine now, here in mid 2020 I mean late 2025 that the internet and everything related to the internet wasn’t always the fast-forward money-making machine that it is now. An entire generation – and their young children – has now grown up with the impression that it is an entirely commercial process and is where money happens, and of course.
It’s hard to remember that for a very long time, no actual money was being made in the internet world, except perhaps by the tool sellers, but the general process of ‘getting the internet up and running’ was either loss-making or on the other hand, never intended to make any money at all and just coast along as some kind of idealised activity.
By the latter I point at the already established ‘shareware’ (soon to become ‘open-source’) movements, which at first hardly impacted the general public, allowed to grow in it’s own way, and was seemingly a good thing, but largely unstructured, often acting more as personal portfolios of skill level and apprentice pieces.
The internet at that stage was a sort of ‘super RS-232 network’ whereby you could communicate with impressive reach, using early email, early usenet, and also send receive and deposit small files, nothing big or important, but you could. None of it had any pretence of making money, or had anything to do with money at all in fact. It was just a side-activity, not your job, just a thing you tucked in alongside a job.
Soon came a new thing on the internet, The World Wide Web, taking a long time to make any impact at all, then suddenly catching on. Along the way groups of people thought it was going to go in this direction or that direction, we have to do this or do that, but consequently for most people involved this also didn’t make any money at all. It lost a spectacular lot money for some groups of people. In a few cases a few people won the lottery but had no idea how they won (like any lottery) but became revered for their advice anyway. But overall, it wasn’t a money-making concern. It wasn’t at all. For a very long time. Because nobody really knew how.
What it took was to pervert the original notion of the World Wide Web so that the ‘interconnected web of sites’ was demolished, no site would in fact connect to any other (or risk losing customers), and the opposite of a web was implemented, each site became a trap, each site denied the existence of the rest of the web, each site became a landlord and you, the user, is now the serf. That’s now the commercial reality, allowing them to chisel away at extracting money in various ways – but we must remember that for a very long time around the turn of the century (plus and minus about a decade) it wasn’t like this at all, it had real difficulty being commercial in any viable way.
Rupert Reynolds