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Comment by cbr | Hacker News Reader

The Herring: What do you think about Netscape’s vision that someday soon we will all be automatically hooked to the Net when we boot up our computers, and their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world?

Jobs: I wish the world could work that easily, but it doesn’t. You are talking about ideas, I am talking about reality.

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I got there (on the net all the time) in '96, that's probably the earliest it was possible for a residential customer here (Canada). Before that, unlimited plans weren't a thing.

I stopped being on the net all the time in late '97 when my ISP banned me from the modem pool during prime-time since my Linux box would tie up one of their line 24/7.

Then I got it back again in late '99 when we moved somewhere with DSL coverage (early Nortel 1024/128k "DSL".) I have had high-speed, always on internet continuously since. Currently FTTH at 100/30m.

So Jobs, speaking in 1994 about average consummers, was right. Late '90s / early '00s saw ubiquitous DSL/Cable take over as the dominant access technology. Obviously iPhone brought always online to the mobile phone market later.

20 years later with Chromebooks this finally happened.

No, it happened four years later with the iMac.

At the time of the article, you had trouble getting a computer with a TCP/IP stack on it out of the box. The NeXT machines did, and Macs did, but most people had windows and didn't even have TCP/IP, IIRC

The iMac was the first internet connected out of the box machine.

There's more to it than being connected to the Internet out of the box.

>> their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world

Replace Netscape with Google and Navigator with 'Chrome'

Windows 95 had TCP/IP support, but didn't enable it by default on network cards etc.

More so with Firefox OS, since it is a descendant of Netscape.

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