The information superhighway

Do remember the internet being called this? It seemed silly at the time, but now it sounds totally ridiculous.

I recall half the commercials back in the 26.4/56kbit modem days for ISP providers toting it, as well as quite a few sitcoms/cartoons toting it as that....

But yeah, ridiculous by todays standards, it's more like ad/porn/virus-infested super freeway with no U-turns.

LMAO :-)

I remember that, and my group called it the information super backroad with potholes...

As far as my broadband is concerned, it's more like the information super traffic jam.

Do people still say/do all that 'power' bullsh*t too?
I heard: Power-surfing, Power-sleeping, Power-walking and a load of other hyped-up crap, but I tried hard to forget it.

I once nearly bit a friend's head off for talking that sort of drivel to me...something about power-walking....oh the raw crackle, the seething, pulsing, pounding, power of a swift walk! GRRAAAHHH! SEE ME WALK!

power nap :-)

I still see it as the information super-highway.

I knew the Xtreme bit had been taken too far when I started seeing it on the supplies at our Neuro lab.

I think this was a brand name for BT ISDN lines

Heh. anyone remember those older Intel commercials?
Apparently a P4 makes the internet faster.

I thought it was still called that ocassionally.

Wasn't the term "Information Super-Highway" an invention of Bill Clinton and Bill Gates...? Has anybody read "The Way Ahead" and "Business at the speed of thought" by Gates? I've only read "Barbarians led by Bill Gates", and that book was pretty cool. ;-)

No. In fact Bill Gates proposed that the Internet would fail miserably because it could not possibly compete with commercial networks, like AOL and MSN.

Lol, in the UK its more like the "information-M25" for those on broadband and the "information-sheep-filled-country-lane" for the modem diehard :D

isnt that like saying the 'automobile' can't compete with a fiesta? :/
(unless aol and msn were once like prestel & compuserve before it used the internet)

Any time I see this term I am reminded of Homer Simpson's concise description:

"The information superhighway told the average person what some nerd thinks about Star Trek."

FlameDuck, yes I know that he thought that MSN would take over the world. That's why "Information Superhighway" does not need to be synonymous with Internet. It was only in the second edition of "The Way Ahead" that Gates began to speak of the Internet, in the first edition he was still fantasizing about MSN as the business backbone of the future.

My memory could be wrong, but I still think that Clinton was using the Superhighway-expression back in the late 90s as if he was inventing it.

D4NM4N, yes, MSN was -excatly- like AOL or CompuServe when it started. First, it was a closed Online Service for subscribers only, then it became an Internet Service Provider, then it became a portal site. Like most "new" business ideas of Microsoft, MSN was launched when Online Services were already becoming obsolete because of the rising Internet.

Floyd, I love that quote. Great! :)

does anyone remember Clive James?, he used to go on and on about the information super highway in his monologs