Episode: 4128
Title: HPR4128: 30 years of the internet
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4128/hpr4128.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:56:02

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4128 for Wednesday, the 29th of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled 30 Years of the Internet.
It is hosted by Nightwise and is about 31 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Nightwise looks back at 30 years online and how the Internet has changed
his life.
Hey there, Hacker Public Radio.
This is Nightwise, checking in for another show.
I had recorded this show earlier, but I asked Ken if it would let me re-record it because
I wanted to get my ducks in a row before I started to talk about all of this.
As I'm speaking, this into my little microphone, as I'm making a little stroll along the place
where I live, there's a discussion going on regarding all the future of HPR comments and
feedback that's going around, which is a good thing, but I decided I'm not going to
go into that topic until the dust settles there and a couple of replies shows might come
in and talk about something else.
Because somewhere around now marks my third desenium on the Internet, I have been online
for 30 years.
I wanted to look back at those three decades and see what the Internet has brought us.
So let's start at the beginning, shall we?
I live in Belgium and back in the 90s, broadband didn't exist at all.
Like everywhere, the Internet was only barely coming to fruition and I was into computers
back then, getting into it, I got my first PC and I was really starting to find out more
about computers.
This was at the beginning of my tech career and I was very interested at this, this Internet
stuff.
So I bought a book, I bought a book on the Internet for dummies.
Back in the days, those dummies series didn't, they weren't yellow yet, they were orange.
And remember, back in those days, learning a lot about software and applications and services
by reading the book first.
So before I even got onto the Internet, I had read a book about the Internet and talked
about Gofer and Finger and about Mosaic and these browsers and stuff.
And I got me very, very interesting, interested in this Internet thing, which of course I wanted
to try out.
I got my chance late 1993 when the public library in Hustle, which is the capital of
our province, got computers with Internet and you could go onto the Internet, you would
go onto the Internet, like on top of it for some reason.
And I decided to give it a try.
So took the bus over to Hustle and there was this long table with these computers on both
sides in the middle of the entrance hall.
And people were on them looking at things, it was very interesting to look at.
And they were on the Internet.
So that's those, I think, eight computers had a shared modem and you could go on and
you could book a slot and I would go onto the Internet.
And I remember very fondly those first moments.
The first, the browser I used was Internet Explorer 3 on that machine.
And the first website I entered was www.yahoo.com because I had read in the book that that is
where you could find this catalog of things that you could do on the Internet.
And that was okay.
So I decided to give that a try, sorry, got some cyclists coming my way, and decided to
give it a try.
So I just went on the Internet, went to Yahoo, took a look at the categories and of course
the first category I picked was Star Trek.
I'm an nerd.
So I clicked around and I saw this text up here and I saw these images slowly appearing
on the screen, line by line, it was very exciting, it was extremely slow.
And I remember clicking on something and nothing happened.
And about ten minutes later, suddenly I jumped because I had headphones on and I heard
the voice of James Dewey and Scotty singing a song because I had clicked on an audio file
which of course took forever to load.
And that's when I first heard audio coming from the Internet, it was very exciting.
Those were my very first days.
I think it was a couple of months before you could subscribe to a Internet service for
home, for regular people.
And believe it or not, the product was called, was distributed by one of our major telcos.
It was called Skynet.
Skynet.
The cool thing is I still have the Skynet Dailup Box which only consists of a little booklet
with your login and your password and some phone number, you should call on the CD with
I think Internet Explorer 3 or something like that.
And then we got Skynet at home, it was very exciting.
I was lucky because it was Dailup all the way back then.
And at my house, because we had a business, we had two lines, we had a phone line and
we had a fax line.
So I plugged my modem into the fax line, first I had to get a modem, took me a while to
get that hooked up, it was very exciting.
And then I decided to do the Dailin for the first time from home.
Took me a little bit to get that Windows 95 Dailup connection up and running.
And I do remember that I had found a CD somewhere that came with Netscape Navigator or Netscape
Communicator as it was called back then.
And that was my first experience of going on the Internet.
And I have served many, many hours on this little Dailup line and I used to go to all kinds
of websites and take a look at pictures and these web rings I would surf and stuff like
that was big geek and suddenly I started to get access to this whole new world.
Because before that, being a little bit of a nerd or geek, sorry, geek, I had a lot
of contact with English reading books because I loved Star Trek, I loved reading Star Trek
books, I loved getting them in English and it was very hard to find those that you couldn't
order them online because online didn't exist.
And there was only one store in Antwerp that carried these Star Trek novels.
So going on the Internet, I found this massive repository of geek information tailored to
an interest that I had.
Something that was very rare in my daily life was now in abundance and always available.
It was very exciting.
So I remember surfing websites, downloading pictures.
I still have a lot of those pictures on my, on some of my backup CDs.
I found it very exciting to look at all that.
Then I discovered news groups which was also very exciting.
You could reply to messages and then you would go back online and there would be new messages
and stuff like that.
I found the, I think, Alt Star Trek fanfic thing which was very exciting.
So I started printing all these posts with stories and stuff like that.
So I had found this new world for me to discover which was very, very cool.
How long after that?
I was still on dial-up.
I discovered IRC, if anyone told me about what IRC was and how it worked, it was very
interesting.
So I decided to give it a try.
And I went to this server somewhere and I looked for channels and I was looking for music.
So I suddenly found MP3.BE.
OK, MP3.BE, Belgian MP3, this is exciting.
So I came onto this IRC channel that didn't trade MP3 at all.
There were just some kids hanging around there and chatting.
So I got to know them and, you know, chat into them and turns out they were from Louisville
which is one of the main university towns in my country.
And they were all studying over there.
I, I, I never went to university.
I never left my little hometown.
And you don't got to know them and this and that.
And suddenly they said, hey, we're going out on Thursday evening.
Do you want to come?
So there was this.
I was very excited.
I said, yes, please.
So I ended up going to live in with my little car alone and going out with these kids.
And it was like a total different world for me.
This is like small town boy meets big town world.
And I had like, you know, I was, I was staring wide at what these people were doing.
I mean, they had like fights and romantic flings and they would like kiss each other
where everybody was just standing and, you know, it was for somebody from a very small
town boy.
It was very exciting to meet the big city.
And friendship stuck.
And after I met my girlfriend, we ended up going out in Lever every week for a couple
of months.
So suddenly I had this college life, especially, well, the party part that I never had from
school, which was, which is great.
And it was only one of the things that would be tell tale of the way that the internet
would change my life.
Meeting people, I remember discovering ICQ 11420205 is still my ICQ number and I remember
that.
Oh, the sound of your daylight mode in and, you know, it would be quiet and we logged in
and then we would go like, wow, all of these messages that would be waiting for you and
have made friends all over the world.
And I still know these people today, there's a girl from Brazil that I know for 30 years
now.
She was one of my first online chat buddies, which is, which is great.
And we met a lot of these people in real life and it was fun.
And the thing that I started to notice was that, wow, I mean, everybody is behind a handle
I had, Mike then already had my handle night-wise.
And the internet allowed us to meet and connect with people that we otherwise would have
never found out that existed.
Behind these anonymous handles, behind Celta and, and behind Clubman and, and behind Carlos
were real people.
And those were people I got to meet in real life.
And I started to romantically think like, wow, this is amazing.
This is going to change the world.
This is going to connect us all together.
And I remember, you know, internet evolving a little bit still day-up times.
I did an ad meeting call for the very first time at a wheel webcam and I would call in
to some stranger.
And after seeing, well, a little bit of a wiener fest, which was already back then a problem
on net meeting, net meeting was like the proto-proto-proskype, if you want to, if you want to call
it like that.
I hooked up with this man from Canada and, you know, hello, hello, hello, hello, can you
hear me?
Yes, I can.
And I started talking to them, so, so, you know, you start talking to somebody at the
other end of the world real time, which, part was, was not something common these days.
It's like, yeah, no, no, no, that was a big thing.
And I'm, what do we ask?
What's the weather like?
And that was a, it was a good one.
So this guy takes a little wheeler webcam and points it out of the window and he shows
me that it's snowing in Calgary, I think it was Calgary, Canada somewhere.
And I went like, wow, this is going to change the world.
This is going to be the technology that brings us all closer together.
This is going to be something phenomenal, and I am so glad that I may call myself a citizen
of the net.
I am unbiased, unprejudiced, and I have learned that behind every nickname there is a person
and if you get to know that person, we all understand each other.
Maybe very naive, but something that was very real to me at that time.
And I have made a lot of friends on the internet.
Broadband came along and it was me, it was time for me to move out of the house, you
know, I went to look for my old little place, it was 25, and I had a couple of requirements,
one of them being broadband.
So I moved to an apartment in Deepen Beach, which is about 20 kilometers north of where
I lived, because they had broadband over there.
And I had broadband, and I started playing online games and stuff like that.
I set up my first little wee network in the house so that every computer in my apartment,
my two room apartment, had an internet connection, it was all very exciting.
And when I had a friend's over, it was like, wow, oh man, that's easy, he's a geek man.
Oh look at that, he's got my computers and it was my little bachelor Pat with broadband
internet and a network, which was great.
My girlfriend used to come over and I would take her back home at about 10-ish, and then
I would come back to my apartment and I would game until 3 o'clock in the morning online
with my friends.
And it was fun, because a lot of those people I played against, I played Quake.
We're guys that I worked with, I worked as an IT system engineer at a local multimedia
testing center, and all these guys that worked there were on Quake in the evening, and
they taught me with a lot of dying and responding on how to become a little bit good at first
person shooting.
It was fun, it was very social, very social.
Around that time, my little, the company that I had on the side with my friend where we
did DJ gigs, we had a mobile club system, we played parties and stuff, wound down, it
was time to call equates and we shut down.
And I was very much missing the stage.
And I did some local radio work in deep and big, old places, where I already had an idea
for I want to do a show about the internet, and then went like, what, no, the internet,
I want to talk about the internet, nobody gets the internet, this is like, this is Hick
Town, Deeper Big, then my ideas didn't really take there, and I was frustrated because
I didn't really find anything that would release my creative urges.
I already had a little bit of a website going where me and my friend would write little
articles, kind of like a proto blog, and then I met podcasting.
I was working as a consultant, an IT consultant back then, and I had my first long drives towards
work, like an hour and a half commute up, and an hour and a half commute down.
The first days I tried listening to the radio that made me either nuts or depressed.
I tried CDs, which was also very frustrating, and I didn't really know you know what I'm
going to do with my time.
So when I was sitting there, I was like playing with Windows Media Player, which had some
radio streams, and suddenly there was this one show on there, I forgot the name, which
was kind of a proto podcast, and they had the interviews, it was kind of like streaming
radio on the computer, it was a stream, the web talk guys, that was what I was called,
and yeah, this guy over, that the interview, and this guy was Adam Curry, and I'm like wait
a minute, I know Adam Curry, Adam Curry, you know, I'm Belgian, he's Dutch, he's famous
radio DJ, and he used to do, like, countdown show, TV, like Avro Stopelp, I think it was,
you know, he was very famous, and he was banging one of the Dolly Dots, which is also kind
of cool, which he was a lot older than, and I'm like wow, what is this, and he was talking
about, you know, podcasting, and I went like, wait a minute, this is like radio and computers
and the internet all in one, and I was hooked, and once again the internet started to change
my life, because I discovered podcasting, started podcasting my own, to start in my own podcast
back in 2005, 2006, and for me it was like the best thing ever, it was like the, it was like
the, the synergy of radio, it was like the synergy of geekery, and it was like the synergy
of, of creativity all together in one, which was, I could, you know, do my own radio station
and start talking about the things that I cared about, and I was hooked, I started listening
to a lot of podcasts, connecting to these people back in 2005, so like 50, you know, everybody
knew everybody, and I was just a small wee guy, you know, I kind of, you know, a total hero
worship of Mr. Adam Curry, you know, no it is, but I met a lot of interesting people, and I
contributed my own little skits to their podcast, and that's how I got to know the biz, and it was,
it was fun, I think it was way back in 2006, I was playing around on Skype, and suddenly there
was like these, these two guys who were talking, and it was an open call about podcasting, and I'm
like okay, oh boy, and I clicked in, and I met Dave Gray, Sebastian Proof, and Katie Murray,
three names that would come to mean a lot in my life, because I have formed long lasting friendships
with these gentlemen, I have spent more hours talking to them to some of my real friends,
and I started podcasting with them, so I did the Aussie Geek podcast, the Global Geek podcast,
which were real time recorded podcasts, now go figure. Keith is in Canada, Dave is in
Australia, and we, me, is in the middle in Belgium, so if you want to record live, that meant that
we had to, that we had to do it at about six in the morning for me. Dave would be on his second
beer, Keith would be almost going to bed the night before, and I would be, I would have to get
up at six a.m., and jump into this kind of morning radio show about nerdy geek stuff,
and the sharpest whip as we started recording, and I have had many, many, many beautiful Sunday
and Saturday mornings recording these episodes. Because I wasn't a podcasting, I also learned a lot,
I listened to, to shows about security, about IT, and stuff like that, and pretty soon somebody
at work picked up that I was into this, and when they offered, they opened up a new position
as somebody who, they needed somebody who needed to do some service management, but also had
just innovative look ahead, was into new things, and I went into this job interview, and you know,
we were talking, and he said like, you know, what do you do for hobbies, and said like, well,
I do a little podcasting, and he looks at me and he says, you're the nightwise, and I went like,
what? You're the nightwise, I went like, well, the nightwise is a little presumptuous, but I am
a nightwise, or I am the nightwise, but nightwise is good. Yeah, I am. He said like, I listened to your
show, and I was like, what? You listen to my show. Now remember, I podcast in English, podcast in
the early 2006, 2007 was unknown in Belgium. We had like one other podcast in Dutch, and a couple
of Dutch guys doing something. It was all, you know, these were mostly Apple related shows talking
about Apple, how great Apple is, and that was it. So there was not the plethora of content that
there is today, and this guy knew me, which was very weird, but he said like, you know what? You
have a very, you think outside the box, and you're into new technology, and you're what this
company needs. I'm going to hire you. And boom, once again, the internet started to change my life.
And it has been mostly like this for the last year. I mean, when I started to,
10 years ago, going into my own little business as a nightie consultant, it wasn't that big of a
thing, but of course, the internet helped me to get a job and stuff like that and make connections.
But it also meant that as time went along, my own business transformed into something that is
geared towards using the internet for your business as we started up our little marketing and
communication firm, this is a digital marketing firm. The internet threw me a bone again
back in the corona days. With my little firm, we used to teach groups of entrepreneurs
on how to use social media and stuff like that, and we would be, you know, I mean, my wife would
be teaching this to these groups live, you know, standing in front of them and doing an explanation.
And corona came, and everything got in lockdown, and everything got shut down.
And the organization we were doing these trainings for called me and said like, dude,
what are we going to do? And we're like, oh yeah, we've got all these trainings planned.
I said, we'll do it online. Can you do that? Yeah, sure. Now, this was the corona days,
where, you know, everybody would be just like happy that they would be able to talk to each other
and get in a call. That 2020, was it? 21? And it was all still chaos. So one day after the lockdown,
we got a contract to produce these lessons, these real-time classes online. I got a call from the,
from city hall. Can you, no, actually, I called city hall. We've got a lot of people out there
that, that a lot of entrepreneurs out there that don't know how to promote their business online.
Maybe we should do some kind of an emergency webinar on how to do that. And then we're like,
fine, do it. Here's money. Go make five. And pretty soon, three other towns called, we wanted to.
And I went like, we need to order some here. So that night we ordered that same night,
we started ordering SM58s and, and mixers and stuff like that. And suddenly my, my podcasting
background and my wife's background as a photographer turned us into video makers,
live stream makers, because even at that point, we started to approach the whole thing a lot
differently. You know, we set up multiple cameras. We set up lighting. We, we made little
lower thirds and animations and trailers and we made television. We did a morning show. And it was
a lot of fun. So instead of doing like five training sessions for these entrepreneurs that we
had booked, we ended up doing 120 episodes. And we thought, you know, that was going to be a
summer we're going to be done. And then the internet changed again, because they said, you know,
what? Yeah, pack up your shit, come to our company and do it for us. Make a TV studio,
on wheels, do it. And so that happened. And this internet has threw me, has given me so many chances
and so many wild stuff that happened. And I never, ever, ever thought that that would be the case
when I clicked that button the first time that said, uh, Dale up. So yeah, I was, it's been quite a
ride today. I make my living off the internet. I am, I am an online storyteller that helps
companies bring their messages to their audiences. And I teach them how to tell the right story and
how to use the tools. And I help them get it out there. This is what me and my wife make our living
out of. And it's, it's, it's amazing. I've seen it all. I've seen, I've seen the birth of Dale up.
I've seen podcasting. I've seen blogging. I've seen the web 2.0. I've seen all these magnificent
things. And then it comes to the conclusion, what's next? And I am worried. And I got to say one
of the things that's, and I'm, I want to quote, uh, the previous source of HPR who called it the
beautiful insitification of the internet. And there I've seen as well. Now with insitification,
I do not mean setting something up, finding a community to sit on it to, to, to come and,
and, and bring it live and then commercialize it. That is not insitification. That is business.
That is a business model. We are out there, you know, the bills get paid. Everybody got to pay
the electricity bill. Uh, that's okay. You always pay with something. Whether it's with money or
it's with your data or it's with your personal information, you always pay nothing for free. If it's
for free, you're the product. So I don't mind, um, if, whoops, that's a thunderstorm coming. And I
am still way out. Uh, I don't mind people turning it and turning a platform into monetizing
a platform. What I do think that the insitification of the internet has brought us was through social
media. I thought we would be brought together more. But because of the fact that most social media
platform forms appear not to bring the best out into people. What I had a feeling, the early
internet did, but bring out the worst. And why is this? Well, because the algorithm is triggered
towards content that is inflammatory. The worst it is, the more attention it gets.
And back in the early internet days, your content needed to be wholesome, to be noticed, to be valuable.
And now it just needs to be the worst possible things out there. You know, you take a look at some
of the comments and it's like, Oh, Jesus, you take a look at some of the YouTube stuff that'll
lowest common denominator out there. You take a look at an Instagram where
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