[HN Gopher] Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia (1997)
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       Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia (1997)
        
       Author : hliyan
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2023-07-16 12:08 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (u20.freesoft.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (u20.freesoft.org)
        
       | vintagedave wrote:
       | Of the half-dozen worldwide mirrors, none are still up. A shame.
       | 
       | One was hosted at TAFE Tasmania, which is a tertiary educational
       | institute for adults (not sure how to express it in international
       | terms: a polytechnic, perhaps. Practical skills-focused learning
       | that people might do instead of university.) My father was a
       | teacher there around that time; I'll ask him if he has any memory
       | of mirroring this kind of content.
        
       | pavlov wrote:
       | From the FAQ:
       | 
       |  _Q: How can I start an Internet Service Provider (ISP)?_
       | 
       |  _A: Starting an Internet service provider - that can be a
       | daunting undertaking._
       | 
       |  _My personal advice is - don 't do it. I say this simply because
       | I think the market is flooded right now. Internet service has
       | become a commodity item. It is very difficult to distinguish
       | yourself from the competition on anything but price. To compete
       | at the $20/mo level now prevailing in the consumer industry,
       | you'll need a user base of several hundred to run in the black,
       | and who knows how long before you can pay off the initial
       | investment in hardware, which could easily run over $10,000 - not
       | to mention payroll, rent, headaches, etc, etc_
       | 
       | You need to somehow find several hundred people who want to use
       | the Internet. Daunting!
       | 
       | (The author was presumably right that the dial-up ISP market was
       | saturated already in 1997, but it's still neat to see how the
       | Internet went from reaching millions to billions.)
        
         | thesuitonym wrote:
         | I think the author was talking more about the difficulty in
         | finding a few hundred people who want to buy Internet access
         | from _you_ , rather than finding a few hundred people who want
         | Internet access in general.
        
       | tomrod wrote:
       | This is the true value prop of the internet. Cumulative
       | improvement with expert involvement needed to navigate the top-
       | level terrain. Very Doctorow-an in spirit.
       | 
       | The walled gardens inevitably become choked by spam, as they
       | easily classify where the spam targets are.
       | 
       | Bring back the Federated Web!
        
         | boringg wrote:
         | Also the site maps are way better
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-17 23:02 UTC)