"The average home computer at the time was a Commodore 64 or Apple II. If you had the money, you could afford a 2400 baud direct connect modem that downloaded BBS pages faster than you could read them."
Sure, although most C64s had 300 baud modems. Maybe 1200.
Your point?
"Maybe that hindered the widespread adoption of the Internet much more than some unseen barrier that only Al Gore could demolish?"
Simple. Where would you dial in? What number would you call to get to the Internet? The concept of an ISP didn't exist. There was no service for them to provide. It was only routed to certain nodes, and if you weren't on the list, you couldn't get a feed. To be a node, you had to meet certain requirements, including being able to store a certain amount of information for a set period of time. How much depended on the time frame. In early 1984, we had a 120 meg. disk pack dedicated to it. By early 1986, it had grown to 200 meg. By the time Gore's bill kicked in, I don't have a clue what the requirements were, but it was much, much more. There were probably fees too, but that wasn't my concern. The VAX and the modem bank was my concern.
What hindered access was the lack of infrastructure. No company was going to pay for it because there wasn't a visible market.
Your problem is you don't know how things were at the time. So, you apparently are assuming things were like they are now, only smaller. That isn't true. Things were totally different. |
