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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

I hope you realize the irony of picking an arbitrary OS theme, something that has no correlation to the Internet in any way, as a meaningful point in the history of the Internet.

As I said it’s all arbitrary. I might pick the time around Google’s founding as the early Internet, others might pick Yahoo, others might pick anything before eternal September.

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You're trying to argue that 2003 isn't the early Internet. Seems like you're trying to have your "Ackchyually..." moment right now because you didn't know 4chan existed.

No, I’m saying the Internet was already in mass adoption for the preceding decade. Talk to old timers and they’ll reminisce that the early days of the internet were great until Eternal September in 93. Others will reminisce about the days of BBS. I’m saying “early internet” is a relative term that has more to do with the person interpreting than any objective definition.

I put the start of the mainstreaming of the internet in July 1993, the month a cartoon was published in the New Yorker captioned, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Before then, it was quite unusual to see coverage of the internet by the mainstream press (and what coverage I saw took a theoretical or "far" view, i.e., as part of a discussion of governmental policy). After then, coverage exploded.

This is an American perspective: the timing was probably different in other countries.

Let's just call it "pre Facebook/Twitter" Internet, then. Because that's what it is.

2003 was after the dot com boom and crash. There is no possible definition of "early Internet" that can include 2003.

It's clearly when AOL started offering a monthly subscription for unlimited Internet usage.

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