1994: Are YOU Ready for the INTERNET? | Tomorrow's World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
Kate Bellingham reports that an exciting new interconnected world - a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and ever film ever shot will be at our fingertips - is tantalisingly close. The information superhighway will be a high-capacity digital communication network, which in time could revolutionise the way we shop, socialise and work.
The groundwork for this technological behemoth is already well underway, with computers already communicating with one another to allow users to send electronic mail (President Bill Clinton is already connected) and access news, weather and even some shopping services. For the information superhighway to really take off though, it needs more capacity than the UK's ageing network of copper telephone wires can provide. Is Britain prepared to invest in the sort of high-capacity fibre-optic cable network that can make the technological utopia a reality?
Originally broadcast 29 April, 1994.
You have now entered the BBC Archive, an audiovisual time machine that will transport you back to the golden age of TV to educate, entertain and enlighten you through our classic clips from the BBC vaults.
Make sure you subscribe so that you never miss a single stop on our amazing journey through the BBC Archive - kzhead.info?...
Now imagine all those movies are spread over a dozen different platforms that each cost monthly subscriptions and not one has a good selection.
Boom, you beat me to it. Imagine a dozen greedy corporations saying 'I want my slice' and the Internet dying a death of a thousand cuts.
Well at least we have KZhead
Yar har, fiddle-dee-dee, Being a pirate is alright to be! Do what you want cause a pirate is free, You are a pirate!
PLEX servers, amirite!?
Now imagine utorrent and wcostream Discover possibilities instead of sleepwalking into costs
1994 doesn’t feel so long ago, but yet it was a whole different world.
A better world.
@@Adam_KazmiI was 12-only feels like yesterday
I was 10 years old going on 11 30 years ago
@@Adam_Kazmihappy 48th birthday
@@RealMTBAddict A lot worse world.
30 years later and we’re watching this on our internet-enabled wireless video-screen-phones with higher resolution than the best TVs of the time. All while taking a dump.
Too much information 😵💫
I did a spit-take 🤣
Bravo.
...and that internet-enabled wireless video screen phone downloaded this video at a speed exceeding the UK's combined Internet bandwidth back in the days.
...a wireless phone with a screen that not only allows you to watch videos in the bathroom, but also to play 3d video games with anyone in the world.
Knowing what came after, I value the 90's more than ever before.
I really miss the 90s.
"I Did Not... Have... Relations... With that Woman... Ms. Lewinsky" - Bill Clinton ( An American Legend )...
‘90s
This aged remarkably well.
Everything except her embroidered vest.
@@paaao Nah, I know a lot of women who would love that outfit right here and now. It may not be something to wear while making a tech presentation on camera, but it's good for a casual afternoon.
lol im sure what you mean by that. the set is vary 90s and the tech is vary old and outdated. but it is cool to see the beginnings of the main stream of the internet
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 I think he means that the presenter isn't saying anything silly like "by the year 2000 you'll be plugging your brain into a virtual reality recreation of Buckingham Palace, where there will be giant buttons to press with commands like 'MAIL' and 'BUY HOTDOG,' and it will be glorious because it's THE FUTURRRRRRRRE."
The set and the lighting looks really nice. They've done a great job filming this.
"And earlier today, I felt very privileged, as I received an email from a Nigerian Prince, telling me I'd inherited his uncle's fortune..."
You too? What a coincidence, I sent $1,000 off to him for customs duties and should be getting mine pretty soon.
Nah, that nigerian prince thing was a scam; But I discovered that a very wealthy banker had the same surname as mine, and because of some law shenanigans in their country, they could use my help to get those MILLIONS of doolars that were locked in an account... or something like that
@Враги Oh really? But I wasn't joking and now i'm a millionaire because a bank in nigeria needed someone with my surname to access millions of dollars in a locked account. 😂😂😂😂
I got an email another day from some federal agency saying they had confiscated millions from various scams and wanted to give me some of the money. The mental gymnastics for some of these scams is pretty crazy
yeah, I've paid mine as well, but weird as it may seems, my account balance has shrunk and no inheritance has came into so far, shall I go to the embassy to claim my reward???
30 years later I’m STILL waiting for fibre
Did you send a letter to your telephone company to ask for it ?
@@unnamedchannel1237 They say on the website it’s ‘available soon’. It’s been in my street for the last 2 years… just not at the end I live at. Makes it even worse 😆
For fibre to the door yes most of us are. What she's talking about almost certainly was fibre to your local exchange that allowed broadband to become an option over dial up. Honestly this video is one of the most level headed and aged well presentations of the future of the internet from the early 90s
Same.
You have it, you just don't know it. The internet connection you have to your house is on copper, but after only a few hundred meters that likely turns into a fiber optic connection. The reason we can communicate globally in real time and send so much information so quickly is because we do now have those fiber optic super-highways the reporter spoke about.
Made me nostalgic for actual professional journalism.
Made me nostalgic for the world before the internet.
@@artugert Now that’s a statement!
@@sfkeepayand one I agree with!
It's amazing watching a video proposing all this and actually watching it on the finished product. I love the retro programmes like this.
Watching videos might be finished but computers definitely aren't. We still have way more to come, especially in the means of AI and VR.
in 1994 it had came a pretty long way already. more amazing those from 40's to 70's
Who said the product is finished?
Was at a technology fair maybe 25 years ago. Streaming was the hot new thing. Everybody talked about watching the news and movies on computers in a few years time. Retrospectively it's astounding how right they were.
Its far from a finished product, i think in 10years the internet you know today will not be around
I personally doubt this will ever happen. It is just too fantastic to be true.
I've heard everyone also gonna have little phones in their pockets where we can see pictures and videos, even entire movies. that's madness!
Nothing too good to be true ever comes to fruition
never believe anything you see on the internet, this will never happen.
@@andreabruson5558 It is madness! We still had a rotary dial telephone when i was a Senior in High School.
it did not go as expected to say the least
the yr was 1992 and our computer teacher was telling us about the internet. She had a portable computer that was being carried in what now looked like a suitcase. She went on and on about how the internet was going to change the world. She sounded crazy and we didn't pain her to much attention. I'll never forget her.
prophet from the future giving u a fortaste of whats to come
I always remember the day I first dialled up to AOL from a disc in a magazine, from that day in 1996 life changed.
Am a computer texting you Am just testing my program Need oil But I have eco warriors on my back But don't worry am smart Opps my battery low Speak to you soon Your AI computer
I remember downloading a shareware version of Doom directly from Id homepage. I loved it so much that I went to the computer store the next day and bought the game package. Came home and realize I needed an external floppy drive to install the DOS based floppy disks of the game !!!!
"Hack the planet"
One time our modem somehow accidentally dialed the police. My sister and I heard them through the speaker and were afraid we were going to be arrested, lol.
I remember when video phones seemed so amazing. Whether it was through a webcam online or one of those video phones they sold at the time. It seemed so futuristic that you could call someone and see a video of them. Nowadays pretty much anybody can call anyone with a video call and nobody cares. Heck people barely want to even talk on the phone let alone show themselves on video. People would rather text. So it is kind of like the telegraph won in the end! lol
The 90's is 30 years away but whenever people mention about it, it still feels like the era was only 10 years ago
1990 is 30 years away. 1999 is 21 years away.
@@namedrop721 23 years ago*
Now you'll both need to come back every year to edit your comment for accuracy. 😁
Yeah, I'm mentally stuck in 2000 too. Whenever I think about the 80's it's always 20 years ago...
My theory is it's because not a huge amount has changed since the 90's. The 60's, 70's and 80's were so different every decade but ever since the early to mid 90's we sort of reached "peak modern".
I'm glad we don't have to call it "The Information Superhighway" any more. It's impressive how she was already talking about fibre and streaming media. This was a well researched piece.
I did NOT expect her to talk about fibre optic and streaming. Someone from the future was talking to her!
@@RaniaIsAwesome Haha, ikr. She should make a new one and tell us how the AI overlords will destroy humanity. :p
We never 'had to' call it that, she called it the internet too, although that isn't strictly correct as it's the WWW (world wide web), that uses the internet, internet had been around decades before '94. It was amazing to hear her talk about fibre optics etc though, would have meant nothing to me watching back then in my teens.
Actually it is very sad that its not called INFORMATION superhighway. Atm it looks like more like a goo pile.
I honestly personally preferer 'The information super railway'. Much higher capacity. Faster too.
😮 I was 15 years old in 1994, and I think just 3 to 4 years later I was chatting with people around the world with yahoo’s messenger, it was an era of Internet cafe ❤
in 1994 I was already using Kali to play wc2.exe, I talked with people all the time, usually while casting plague all over their stupid peons, lazy peons
the best years of the internet was the first decade , page uploads were slower than today but all the info was honest and real , even all the dating sites were free and real , real people , no bots , i met so many people in person from dating sites back then because the internet was real , slow but real .
I like how a major portion of this is just the BBC saying "Britian's infrastructure sucks and our regulation is stalling progress."
And yet, I don't remember there being so many pot holes in 1994
And yet at 1:20 she's lamenting the fact the British Government *isn't* sticking its oar in and interfering in the market. Not terribly consistent.
I'm kinda impressed that the whole bit was done in a single take.
Live TV.
It was almost a single take, it cuts to the screen a few times
Yes! Nowadays every influencer has 7 to 10 cuts in a single short sentence and they think they are on par with - or even better than - traditional journalists and television presenters 🙄
This is what happens when you employ people based on their SKILLS and not their purple hair colour, skin or sexuality attributes. They’re able to do a whole piece without edits lol. That’s kinda what they’re supposed to be able to do, but apparently not in the 2024 world.
No SD cards! Pure old fashioned tape. Got deadlines to meet, so she had to have it RIGHT! LOL
Those of us in the 50-80 year-old range have it lucky, because we can still remember what life was like before computers and the Internet revolutionized the way we live, yet we're not too old to enjoy what technology has brought us.
That's very similar how I describe my life, and I'm a solid 20 years behind that age group.
I'm 28 and I'm so jealous of you.
I remember as a child around this time, hearing from my parents about computers and technology in the next 20 or 30 years, might even be small enough to fit in our pockets. I remember thinking, "How is that even possible?" But I never thought of computers being in phone form.
Computer in phone form is still weird… To talk onto a screen and not into little holes is weird..
And what's crazier is that for a most people it's not even primarily a phone. It's just an internet device that can also call people. A lot of people hardly ever use their phones as phones
I have a smart'phone' at home on wifi, and a dumb phone to bring along when I go outside. Very peaceful and cheap! @@mrggy
It's terrible having a phone as a computer and I get anxiety attacks. I want two separate.
@@Timbermannetje Phones still have little holes in the microphone parts.
This is remarkably competent and professional presenting and script-writing. I forgot how good TV programmes could be.
A decade or so later the typical documentary would be narrated by a dudebro speaking like he's talking to the bartender.
@@pilotcritic oh my god, this is so true it hurts. Why do people with such terrible reading voices go into reading dry scripts?
Because she is an actual electronic engineer.
@@8bitchiptune420 well, i was talking about how well the piece to camera flows, how well paced it is and how good the script is. Not sure those things have too much to do with the presenter's engineering degree.
@@brkatimachor because she wrote it.
How wonderfully ironic it would have been if she’d said “ maybe, one day, you’ll even be able to watch this archive video on the internet…”
How would that be ironic? Define the word ironic please.
Ironic is your birth. It's like how? How can that be!?!? Which is probably what the doctors and your mom said.@@Andosneez
@@Dan-di9jdHow is that ironic?
The irony of your constant questions.@@Andosneez
@@Andosneez It wouldn't be ironic but it's still an interesting point. The word ironic is outside the mental capacity of a significant amount of the population, don't bully.
Seeing a video that proposes all of this and then seeing the final product is amazing. I adore old-fashioned shows like these.
Kate Bellingham was the perfect host for a BBC broadcast segment about the Internet. Here's an excerpt from her Wikipedia. "Bellingham was born in Buckrose, East Riding of Yorkshire, and educated at the independent Mount School in York, followed by the Oxford University, where she studied physics. She graduated in 1984. She earned her MSc in Electronic Communications Systems Engineering from University of Hertfordshire."
Those early, optimistic days of the internet were so wonderful
Totally agree!
yeah @ 2:47 "you can send high quality sound and video as well' boy if only she knew of the deluge of porn, conspiracy theorists and scammers that would engulf us ...
@@tma2001 Yeah, really sucks when people go questioning things. Why don't they just do what they are told and conform with the collective?
@@tma2001 and memez!
@@peterbelanger4094 yeah its good to be open minded just not so much that your brain falls out ...
It’s disappointing they couldn’t imagine having arguments with complete strangers and having to set cookie policy pop ups on every website. But top marks to the BBC techies who found power extensions for all those beige PCs and monitors in the set background - I hope they weren’t all running from the one plug
You forgot the cat videos and when Austin Powers showed the monkey sniffing his finger.
Lots of Macs, I think. So "Platinum" rather than beige.
Shut up
@@andypughtube Congratulations. You've just won the 'Pedant of the Year' award. 🏆
No, of course not. Plenty of sockets. On the fifteen daisy-chained power strips…
Wow, her knowledge of fiber optic communication in 1994 was a profound prediction of the future of the internet. I love it!
that was shocking , all we knew about back then was DSL to get faster dial up internet and nobody back then even mentioned fiber optics .
shes talking about dark fiber and backbone, not what everyone here thinks
I had already been using the internet for 5 years at work at that point and both signed up for home service and set up my first website that year as well. What's even cooler is that while I have passed it on to others that website is still up and running 30 years later which makes me quite happy.
What's the website?
@@Scl45689porn hub, this guy created porn hub
Sure it is LOL URL please
@@MrThe1234guywhat's so unbelievable about his comment to you? Why would he lie about having a 30 year old website still up and running? I found it pretty cool.
THIS CAME OUT IN 1994?! Whoever wrote this really had its pulse on what the internet of the future was capable of. Damn! I'm impressed!
Believe it or not, 1994 wasn’t the Stone Age
The tech already existed back then. The only thing lacking (at least in the UK) was the political will to put it into practice.
9 year old me in '94 still didn't know how the online shopping thing would work exactly. I thought they'd have a bunch of tubes running everywhere, spitting out goods - but no, derp, there's still going to be trucks and vans in the future.
CERN technicians sent an e-mail in 1972, so they had pondered about many usages by 1994.
Selection bias for the most part… programs that completely missed the mark won't be highlighted 30 years later.
Take a drink every time she says “information superhighway.”
'Information superhighway' was such a big buzzword back then - used far more than 'internet' as a descriptive term. I'm not sure why it was taken on so readily and then dropped like a stone, but no one says it anymore.
now we "Google" it
@@PotatoPirate123 It's a bit of a mouthful to say over and over again, and tbh sounds like quite dated a dated phrase by today's standards
Why do you hate our livers?
Information superhighway always reminds me of jim Carrey in cable guy 😄
30 years later, and it sometimes seems like we're still not ready for it.
The information superhighway transmits all the way to the comfort of your toilet. It’s truly amazing.
The mid-90s was such a strange and exciting time to be alive.
I know, it was really exciting to browse the internet! It gave you goosebumps! I remember that
I got my first Internet connection back then. It was with a dial up modem and because it used SLIP, instead of PPP, I had a static IP address back then. These days, with IPv6, I have a block of 2^72 addresses all to myself.
@ghost mall Yeah, everything has changed so much since then. And that's for me. But when I think of my parents... My mother grew up on a countryside not even having electricity at home until her teen years. Seeing her now doing taxes and buying things online, I wonder, how much has it changed for her!!
@ghost mall I remember those days. Microsoft was slow to get to the Internet because Bill Gates thought proprietary networks were the way to go. Back then, I was running OS/2, Warp 3, which had the full IP stack built in.
@@montecarlostar the feeling of my first remote doom multiplayer match was indescribably magical. direct connection dial up, my friend at his apartment, me at my home, 3 blocks apart. i was giddy for days with the possibilities. it was a feeling that cannot ever be replicated.
It's incredible how much of what was promised actually came true. Shopping, On-demand movies, Music, Super fast broadband etc. 28 years later, you can trace everything she said to something available in 2022.
No doubt true. We couldn't have imagined in 1994 what we have in 2022. Much of what we have today was only "pretend" in sci-fi movies/shows. However, no one could've predicted in 1994 the social cost of this technology, instant everything, and worst of all social media. I truly believe they thought it would all bring people together. Lest we also forget the addiction to this technology. (smart phones especially)
@@sirsaint88 it did bring us together. We just found out we didn't like each other very much when we got together.
@@godmagnus . He, He. Funny but true😉
@@sirsaint88 Profit profit profit, its good money keeping people their eyes glued to smartphones and social media, addiction is a drug, the difference here is there no chemicals involved, its all digital trickeries to put it stupidly simple.
@@SMGJohn or it's increased our knowledge of countries and people around the globe. Made us realise we're not so different from other people and galvanised social and legal reform in places. Like every technology, it's not the tech it's how you use/interact with it.
The narrator was just amazing, she told it so well and explained what was a complex concept at that time so easily
I was expecting it to be cheesy in some way but it's not at all. This woman is pure class.
Right? I’m watching while high and was wondering if the writing was actually good or if I’m high? But reading comments like these validated my initial thoughts. This video is so ahead of its time and the script is so good.
Yeah she's a good communicator and did a good job of actually trying to understand it to inform people instead of just relying on sensacionalism, a quality many journalists lack.
Tv in the 90s was peak
Hilarious comment but correct
@@thomasrussell4674 Why is it hilarious?
It's amazing how far technology has come in just 30 years! Speaking of "super-highway", watching this on a multi-gig internet on a 4K screen...it was a very different world back then!
Imagine a world where you can watch this exact bit of an episode of Tomorrow's World on an information superhighway.
FREE WILL , whence is it given, whence does it end? GOD created us 1stly in SPIRIT then formed our flesh in our mothers wombs. Free will starts on the day you born here and ends on the day you depart from here. it is not given nor found earlier, as earlier you didn`t exist. earth is testing ground, as it has became lucifers kingdom. testing ground for us, to show GOD whom amongst us shall be deceived by lucifer. All the answers are pretty clear ones - aren´t these? - MANY are deceived and FEW are not. None of us can`t drag free will beyond humans earthly life, as it is not earlier nor after found nor given. Jeremiah 1:5 KJV Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. FREE WILL is given for the choices which are here on earth to make. Deuteronomy 30:19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live: Joshua 24:15 And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. Since making choices and being deceived takes place here on earth, free will does not go beyond human earthly lives.
One day.
In the palm of your hand
And it seems road rage is increasing on the information superhighway.
But not, as she suggests, every episode of Tomorrow's World, or indeed any programme, over the superhighway.
What we innocently didn't know in 1994 was just how much the internet would take over our lives. Sometimes I wistfully long for those pre-internet days but quickly realize how much i'd miss the convenience of having everything at my fingertips 24/7.
It was a tougher world but it was also a realer world. The internet is too much of a crutch for many people, their social lives, love lives and often even language skills and work lives are down the toilet with so many people.
@@RaniaIsAwesome I agree which is why i'm thankful that my teens and 20's years were during pre-internet days which helped us forge relationships with people in the real world through human interaction rather than a computer screen. We were able to cultivate our social and language skills with each other much better than generations who never knew the world before social media....and we were lucky for that! One thing i'm thankful for though is how advanced the internet has become. I'm profoundly hearing impaired and use an app that transcribes speech to text with over 90% accuracy in real time (It's called Live Transcribe if anyone's interested). I use it on my phone wherever I go and it's such a lifesaver for me because I don't have to read lips or write anymore and it breaks down so many communication barriers for me. So when I long to go back to those pre internet days I think how difficult my life would be if I went back there without being able to use my app and shudder at the thought because the internet has become such a necessity for me now.
Christopher i did my re-serach on internet we use/take for granted in 2022 did you interent was alrealy used in 1940"s'-50's almost forgetten till bill gates in-vent windows for interent in 1980:s dial to phone line interent way to slow and 1990's teengers age 13-19 re-vented interent by using private emails and making new fun web pages all become wireless/updated pre payed around arond 1998/99 and the rest is history
@@annapiotrowicz7494 I believe you because i've seen some old b&w movies from the 1940's where you see people talking on car phones and also they talk about "wireless" so I know there was some kind of internet/wireless/modem connections going on even way back then.
It's amazing how people managed to meet up before mobile phones. Like when I arrange to meet my friend in the city, sometimes they're delayed, I get a text and can sort out the logistics from there. Prior to this, I can't imagine if someone gets held up or something happens and you're waiting for 20 minutes... would you stay, or would you go. And then if they show up and you're not there... must have been a logistical nightmare.
Thank you for uploading this
I will never forget my first encounter with the internet. I think I was about 5 or 6, and was round at my uncle's house one evening. He was always heavily into technology, and was showing me this beige IBM computer in his back room connected to the internet... I remember being absolutely fascinated and found it slightly eerie when he picked up the phone to let me listen to the data going down the line.
It's amazing how well this clip had aged...! Often old tech videos will sound like 1970s sci fi when played back but this one was really bang on the mark!
They had most of the technology there in it's infancy already so they had a pretty good idea of what was to come.
Since this was published in 1994, the stuff she is talking about already existed. Not everyone knew about or understood it, especially in the UK. But for me, I was in high school and had the internet in the library, and in one of the computer labs. I could already send and receive email, use the Lycos search engine, and read websites, like Jolly Roger's Anarchist Cookbook. It's true I wasn't able to watch any videos, but the internet was clearly going places. It's heartbreaking to remember those days though, back when everything on the internet was free and ads were extremely rare.
@@nyx9875 It was a thing in the UK, I think 1992 was when our first commercial dial up was made available after a 2 year roll out. The UK has been involved in the research and development of packet switching, communication protocols, and internetworking since their origins.. But obviously the US put massive research and resources into what eventually led to the Internet protocol suite. Dial up was expensive and took time to reach across the UK though, So yeah it was far from common for many years. Businesses and business people were the first to have this in their establishments, Then it caught on with average homeowners who heard wanted and had the income, Then as time wen on it became more and more popular and got cheaper and faster and now almost every household and business has broadband or fibre broadband lol
Cause the Brits have always used a higher fps than in the US so it looks smoother and therefore more modern.
It was in 1994 so they are not just speculating on what will come out, the stuff are already out and working, limited only by capacity and speed. It's like reviewing video streaming just as Netflix came out, most houses don't have the internet speed to stream in high quality yet but it was only couple years ahead and youtube and such has been active for years at that point.
Katherine Bellingham (born 1963) is an English engineer and television presenter known for her role presenting the BBC1 science show Tomorrow's World from 1990-1994. Following a period pursuing other interests and raising children, she resumed her broadcasting career in 2010.
@@OriginalMasters yes Bill Clinton would no longer be interested in replying to her. Not cool.
thanks wikipedia
@@OriginalMasters She looks great for 30? Seriously why are people acting like 30 is old. Most people look their best on that age
She was well known also for her 90’s big hair
And she's probably woke trash.
This is a great piece! I remember 1994 and the only places where you could really get on-line were at universities. They already had everything connected in the engineering and science departments. But not many students used internet or e-mail at that time! It was an oddity.
I got an email address at uni in 98, but didn't really start using email till 2000! Seems bizarre now
I was 12 y.o. back then 😅 Now, when I'm 42, I finally got that damn legendary fiber optics at home 🎉
Actual fibre all the way to your home? I wish I could get that here
@paulanderson7796 yep, exactly. It is quite popular and is very cheap, by the way, here in Romania, where I have been living recently. 1Gb per sec is around 8 EUR per month.
Despite all the years that have passed, I'm pretty sure the internet from 1994 is still more efficient than Sky WiFi.
😂
You know you can switch providers?
Dial up internet was soooo slow it took a couple of minutes just to get on and once you did it could take 30 second to a minute to just load a page. It was painful and not fun to use when it first came out.
@@jayc6159I remember downloading sound clips like 10 seconds of a song over dial-up. It took like 3 hours.
No. You’re lucky to have grown with WiFi!
And over 28 years later I'm able to watch that report on a smartphone with multiple times the computing power of all those old PCs combined. As someone who lived through the early days of dial up, I never thought it would go this far.
Nice blast from the past! Though Social Media, being the qunessential ultimate evil born of the internet revolution over the years world wide. And one which they would have never in their wildest dreams predicted back in 1994 into gaining supremacy in all of this! 🍷
My family was late to get a computer and the internet (fall of 1999). It’s really crazy to think just how far we’ve come! And all at speeds that blow away dial up, in your hand!
Now the question is where does it go from here? AI is the future, and the only question is who's going to control it, because there are literally no limits and there is potentially more danger than good to come out of it
@@gato7908 I think we need to stop where we are. Too many evil SOBs in charge.
Also, your smartphone doesn't even connect via fibre-optic cables, but without any cables at all, and at 10,000 times the speed of Bill Clinton's modem 😃
This is so cool. Just a step back in time to revisit what was new
Got connected to Internet in my small hometown in Iran in 2001. Still remember the Yahoo webpage we loaded... how magnificent was technology for us and still is.😌😊😍
Yes it was. And I remember the first time I played a 3d game. It was NFS. I could see a whole new world in front of me like I'm in other planet. I've missed those feelings.
If you were to go back in time, I wonder how much it would blow her mind to tell her that this video would be watched on someone's cellphone via a near globe-spanning wireless network, on a platform that had more content than one person could ever hope to watch in a lifetime.
And that due to this she would lose her brain cells (that her kids wouldn’t even develop) and never be able to make such a good TV presentation again. Instead she’d be just switching from one nonsense to the other on her chosen platform increasingly looking and feeling like a zombie. Yeah, that mind would definitely be blown, in every way.
Its only 28 years ago so pretty sure she can reflect back on that herself now.
You know, she's still alive, so you can probably find her email and ask her
Dude the lady is very well alive 🤦♂️
You think people alive in 1994 are now dead??
Absolutely fascinating to travel back 30 years to see "the future". It really is amazing just how much the internet has impacted the modern world.
affected
@@davetrousers it had a very large impact indeed. Whether that was a good thing or not is still unknown.
Objectively it has had a terrible effect on humanity.
as someone that was born in 1994, I resent your statement of travelling back "30 years". I think you'll find it's 28 years, actually! ;)
@@horiabodeanu7641 - It has shortened our attention spans. - It has introduced deranging non-stop political radicalisation to the masses. - It has ruined dating and courtship. - It has given authorities immense power to monitor and condition our behaviour. Far from being a source of information, we have now reached a point where you can no longer tell what is even real, be it a video, image or a news report. Nothing on the internet can be trusted and unlike previous methods of propaganda, there is very little effort and zero consequence for simply making up complete lies online. A central site like Wikipedia that 90% of people use as their primary source of facts can be re-written in seconds and is aggressively gatekept by a small elite group of ideologues in California. Similar situation with other hugely influential social media sites. We have a long way to go and perhaps it will turn out to be a boon to humanity, but for the meantime my opinion is that the internet is doing massive damage to our society and our humanity and poses a short term existential threat.
As others, I'm really impressed with how well she describes what's to come in such a short piece, and demonstrates the limiations of the technology at the time. I've seen plenty of videos of others at the time talking about the Internet, and they are basically clueless about what the heck is going on, asking incredibly dumb questions and just acting like it's magic, lol! I also remember those days and how exciting it was to create a website that was accessible by anyone anywhere on the planet. It seems totally like so what today, but at that time, it did feel incredibly powerful and futuristic, like creating your own newspaper or TV station. But yeah, it was slow, and super ugly.
This all felt like Hokum when we were first learning about this. Kind of like how in the 80s our teachers were talking about VR glasses and being able to go Anywhere!! Growing up - none of that happened and the possibilities about Computers didn't seem possible either.. Boy - how I was wrong!!
I was 34 then. Running a small sign manufacturing company, using notebooks, Polaroid cameras, typewriters, drawing boards and fax machines. We did pretty well without t'internet. Now here I am talking to people I don't know. Brilliant!
And getting abuse from them ...shut your pie hole ..Technology is wonderful ain't it.
I love you james keep it up
I was 6 then and the internet ruined my life
Well hello there random stranger!
@@boomerhgt You're the best.
The year was 2001. I was in grade school. The internet was already existing, nothing new. But our teacher was talking about a future where you can get your groceries ordered and delivered to your doorstep through a palmtop, or a handheld computer. I never thought I'd live to see it come true!
meh , big deal. Back in the '50s they promised by now we would have jet packs, flying cars and teleporting back and forth in space. groceries, ha!
Was your teacher a time traveller from the future?
I mean to be fair Tesco had some form of online shopping available since 1997.
Are you referring to the video? It wasn't 2001, this was from 1994.
When it comes to making money, everything is possible, anything can come true...
was honestly shocked that they knew about fiber when I was just 15!! Its crazy to think we in the uk have only really got around to fiber in the last couple of years! This was a great watch!
Makes you appreciate what technologies we have now and take for granted
I miss the ones we took for granted back then, and the less anxious life with longer attention spans, more patience, where instant gratification wasn’t a daily expectation . I often close my eyes when I’m overridden with anxiety today and just time travel using my memory.
I graduated in 1994 and started working at Oracle. Part of my induction was to watch a video of Larry Ellison in his dojo describing the Information Superhighway which would allow us to use a TV in our lounge to do our shopping, banking and watch movies on demand. It seemed like science fiction to me. But within a year or two email and mobile phones were becoming normal and I was surfing the web at work like a pro. I was the first person I knew to have an email address - it wasn’t long before everyone had one. The speed of it was breathtaking and I feel fortunate to have been in there right at the start.
I hope you had stock options!
ours is the last generation to go to school before the world wide web was mainstream. As I age I find it more and more difficult to talk to people at work that can relate to about anything pre internet. It's becoming like I was a cave man and evolved .
Incredible! What do you do now? Im in the digital tech scene in SF now, just started to dive into it, and would’ve loved to witness the transformation of the past 20 years
yeah I remember our school didn't have internet accept maybe one or two computers and we had to go to another location to get on the web. The very next year they put internet in the computer lab. I learned to type on a typewriter.
"John Major doesn't have a modem" is poignant af! It would also be a great name for an indie rock album.
Too busy eating a currie every night. 😉😉
Sounds like a Chris Morris line
how cringe you have to be to think this is a coool album title, pure cringiness
@@gone-by-the-light your right. It would make a much better name for a bar (pub).
I can't wait until this comes out. It's going to be incredible!!
I still am as excited as Kate now
Such innocence. Flower shops and weather maps…. Awwww…. 🤣
Before ‘Two girls, one cup’.
@@AtheistOrphan or the "Tadger Badger" not to mention "Henry Mungshaw's 14 apes"
No not innocence like other things it has been abused . Including robbing your bank account
@@spellbound4383 innocence in 1993 is what I meant. There were such high hopes that the “information superhighway” would make the world a better place and in fact it’s not quite worked out that way.
@@richardmattocks Ah yes I see what you mean. Sad isn’t it.
Almost 30 years later and we in the UK still haven't got a complete national rollout of fibre to the premises yet. Yay "market forces".
2:38 they already talked about fiber optics which will be developped like almost 25 years later. BBC ahead of its time ? Probably, like a Black Mirror episode. It's amazing to see the network was already set up but it wasn't used properly or major companies did not want to be used 3:38 Video on Demand... Dammit, they were freaking visionnaries
What?? Fiber Optics were used in 1994, not developed 25 years later.
BBC 'Tomorrow's world' was always well researched and informative. The piece has aged remarkably well.
30 years later and I'm still watching Top Gear on demand
Can you demand to see what the Veyron can do?
It's eerily uncanny how "modern" this footage looks and feels considering how old it is. Normally, footage from that time period looks and sounds much older. Especially now since early 90s fashion is back in style, Kate Bellingham could pass for a 29 year old Millennial in 2022. I also love the set design. Reminds me of being in a computer lab back in elementary school back when the internet was just taking off. It captures that feeling perfectly.
Most professional productions were recorded on reasonably high quality video equipment. Even if their masters are in standard definition, they'll hold up well if the archival footage has been cared for. The reason why most stuff from the 90s and earlier looks like garbage on KZhead (even if it was originally shot on good equipment) is because you're usually seeing a copy of a copy of a copy that's been degraded and compressed to the moon and back. It also makes a difference if the footage was uploaded during the early years of KZhead because the compression was pretty severe.
It has Beakman's World vibes
you might want to look up "New York City in 1993 in HD - DTheater DVHS Demo Tape" here on youtube if you think a 30 year old SD video is impressive.
it was most likely recorded to film, then transferred to videotape the tape was most likely betacam, which it, along with other professional formats of the time, hold up great today
First thing I thought was: "damn, must have been so much work to carry around all those CRTs"
In 1994 this was not anything revolutionary at that point. Half of my friends had internet connection couple of years later, lots of people started using it for ordering online or sharing info. In my personal opinion, it was the smartphone in the mid 2000s that changed everything meaning you could do all this on a tiny personal device outdoors. This is what blew everybody's mind
Ah the days when we used to live. Now we just watch others live.
Totally thought this would be another cheesy 90's "look at what we'll have in 10 years," thing. Not at all the case -- this was exceptionally pragmatic, thoughtful, and practical in execution. The fibre/fiber-optic cable line for example actually took me by genuine surprise. - Sent on the Information Superhighway via Fiberoptic Cable
Nice blast from the past! Though Social Media, being the qunessential ultimate evil born of the internet revolution over the years world wide. And one which they would have never in their wildest dreams predicted back in 1994 into gaining supremacy in all of this! 🍷
Hi people from the future reading this from the metaverse :)
@@nitinishere3707even now we know no one is going to call it that 😁
It'll never take off. We have blockbuster for movies, and libraries for books!
Pretty clear this journalist took a genuine interest in the subject matter, unlike some journalists who are assigned a story and fake their way through it, not really having done their homework.
She was an engineer too.
@@EugeniaLoli Her being an engineer makes a huge difference.
This made me smile. Thank you.
I still remember where I was when I first heard of the internet. It was February 1995, I was 25 and taking a tour of the TAFE (technical college) library. The librarian had us stop at a single stand-alone computer and said "And that's our internet computer." I thought to myself "Internet? What's that?" LOL. And the rest, as they say, is history. I also remember when mobile phones first became affordable. It was also 1995. A friend had purchased his first Nokia "brick" and there were 5 of us all sitting in his car, taking turns using it. Mind you, the screen was nothing more than a thin, black strip which showed neon green numbers and letters on it. Ah, the future. Such a wondrous thing!
No, I'm not ready. I'm still worrying about the Millennium Bug.
They took care of that ten years ago.
I remember on 31st December 1999 and the Millennium night show on the BBC, where they had what could be the first example of the Millennium Bug. It was a digital watch that was clearly just faulty and showing gibberish on the screen.
Talking about Fibre Optic cable for the internet in 1994 is really interesting, going from having the dial-up internet in 97 to broadbrand in the mid-00s then then finally getting fibre 2023, only took them 29 years to get there...
As someone who was 14 when this came out, I still feel so weird watching this! Things have changed so much
Wow, It's almost 28 years! I still remember how we connected to the Internet from a modem and the telephone line for the first time back in around 2000 with a couple of my friends. ❤👍👍
i had it in 1995 so u late
Amazing, pre-ADSL film. Roll on 30 years and we're still waiting for that full-fat Fibre-to-the-premises connection, but it is probably fair to say most of Britain now has a Fibre-to-the-cabinet connection available. Ah, if only I could go back to 1994 and setup an online bookstore specialising in rare and hard-to-find books, and name my webstore after a South American jungle. I might be worth a bit of money now, if I had done that.
I always assumed it was named after the river?
we opted for 5g brain microwaver instead..
We’ve got fibre to the premises in New Zealand and it’s glorious. 8 Gbps connections are available now and basic connections are 300 Mbps. Bandwidth I couldn’t dream of when I first went online in 1997.
I've lived in the North in a rural area and I've lived in an average sized town in the EastMidlands in the last few years, and both places have had BT FTTP. Glorious 1gbps is more than I need but bloody lovely when downloading games etc.
Where you live we had fttp for more than 5 years
Crazy to think this was released when I was born, how things have changed.
I watched this when it was first broadcast, and I'm watching it again in (almost) the very way that we were hoping for when it was shown all those years ago. Now, where did I leave my flying car so that I can head off to my job on Mars?
I first went online around 1996, shortly after this piece. It was somehow a magical experience despite the slow speeds of the time.
And I was born in 1996 and it was magical moment even if I was slow .
That was the year we got the Internet at home and in my school. I remember the teacher was quite excited about this new technology.
@@vmafarah9473I was born in 95
Me and my buddy would go to a skateboarding website and click on a photo and then go make some sandwiches and come back and the photo would be mostly downloaded. I thought that was pure magic.
@@jasondashney you could print master-baiting support if you couldnt master bait directly to the computer screen for some reason like because it's in the living room
The concept of TV via phone line was mind-blowing in 1994. Strange trust me, I remember watching this
I remember in 1998, watching episodes of South Park in some sort of video format on my computer, in something like 140x108 resolution.
@@Hastur876 DVD was mainstream in 1998 and the resolution was 720 × 480
@@cashbonanza963 Yeah but you didn't download dvds of tv shows the week they came out. Mp4 files were generally low resolution.
It's still mind blowing now, because it's not possible.
We got internet at my house sooner than most, around 1995. We had 2 phone lines, one for talking the telephone and one for the internet. I still remember the sounds dialing up erol’s internet.
Prophetic. Especially the mention of fibre optic, widespread fibre optic was a few years away, streaming a bit further down the road.
Even to this day John Major still hasn’t got a modem
Tony Blair also never used a computer for the entirety of his premiership. He left office in 2007. Different people from a different era. Bill Clinton also never wrote a single e-mail for himself, but that's probably for security reasons - Jimmy Carter had some serious (for the time) computers in the White House all the way back in 1979.
@@halfbakedproductions7887 I believe Carter was looking for a speedier way to contact his local flower shop.
I just called my local computer shop to get one of those modems. They said they didn't know what that was. Too bad, this Internet thing looks interesting. I'll wait a few years to see how it develops.
you can order one from north korea today 🐱👍🏿
But...how did you post this internet message?!
That's pretty much my generation (40 years old) dooming itself into tech illiteracy *Sad to say but especially the woman
@@markmuller7962 Don't worry, this internet thingy is just a passing fad, I don't think it'll catch on.
@@abagatelle eheh exactly 😆
I was born in 1994, I don't remember things being like this with computers.... But, then again we did used to have dial up, AOL, HTML, etc. That dial up sound gave me nightmares as a kid! 😭😭🤣🤣🤦♀🤦♀🤣🤣
I smile as I sit on my phone watching this delivered through fibre on the superhighway.
I remember watching this when I was a kid. I had no idea just how integral the internet would become in modern life.
Remember playing Age of empires 2 back in 1999 with my friend who lived up the road over the new dialup my parents had installed. It’s one of the most memorable experiences of my childhood, the feeling of pure magic was something I’ll never ever forget.
I remember being on message boards when I was 14 and feeling like an explorer going out and talking to people on the literal other side of the world
For me it was Red Alert 2 as a little kid. I remember a 0-300ms ping was considered ''very good'' with a little green circle and 300-600ms was ''good'' with a yellow icon, and 600-900ms was ''mehhhh" and red. I remember it was AOL gold we had, I think it was the "fast" 1mb package. WinMX, Kazaa and Limewire days spending hours downloading a song only to find it didn't work or wasn't what you wanted.
I did the exact same thing and year as you, I had the age of empires 2 demo and played with my school friend, I couldn't believe I could play a game without him being in the same room. I also remember my mum asking me when she got back from work why she couldn't get through to me when she called
Red Alert for me, in the early 90's, amazing multiplayer battles, local and on-line (if it does not disconnect) ... that then WAS the future ... Now ancient history ... Now what to watch, on KZhead's "Super Highway" haha
What's dial up
Oh, I miss Tomrrow's World. It was fun to watch as a kid. It was ten years before I got my first PC, with modem internet (2004). A week later, I got broad band!
I still remember BBS' back then. It was amazing how much fun you could have with the limited technology.
Me too. Had some fun times on BBSes before the web came along.
Beyond 2000 and Tomorrow's world were two incredible shows that will always have a special place in people's hearts.
In Australia I remember watching Beyond 2000, but never heard of Tomorrow's World
Wow the past just came to my mind
@@planetX15 I'm not quite sure if it was English or Australian show but similar premise. Those shows stopped after the turn of the millennium. One of the biggest let downs of this new millennium 🤣
@@realiti773 the theme song and intro sequence to beyond 2000 is nothing short of magical 😊
@@planetX15 Just realised it's this very show itself :P
My senior year in high school, 95-96, our school library had one computer with dial up internet. It was slow and tedious. We all thought it was useless. The next year the little community College I went to was one of the first to get fiber internet. I was amazed at how sites would instantaneously pop up on screen. That's when I realized how huge the internet was going to be
Diel up Internet was a pain it was as slow as a snail to load just one page of information & websites where very , very basic buy modern standards. And I remember if websites had pictures they would be painfully slow in fully loading the picture the bigger the picture the slower it load. I could honestly see the Internet had potential but need a lot of work to make it usable on a daily basis. I remember buying things over the internet for the first time they would take an eternity to actually arrive in comparison to the world of today. I remember thinking. broadband was a major set forward & look at what we have now.
I remember using the Library of Congress on the internet to research a project, in 1995. Also used BBSs to chat with locals about Vespas.
@@alanfox691 56k was fine for browsing the web, even 14.4 wasn't bad for the type of websites they had back then. Faster speed were only really necessary for higher res video and more advanced games
Highest class documentary. As always. I connected to Internet in 1996. That was insanely sweet experience back then.
On the one hand it seems amazing at how spot on this is. On the other hand, it is the BBC, after all. Superb job.
“Imagine if you could spend your free time watching delightfully kitschy BBC archive videos from the comfort of your own home! How wonderful would that be?”
I'm impressed by how well this aged and how it looks like the script was written by Tom Scott!! Someone please tag him.
This does seem like something he'd rather enjoy!
Exactly what I was thinking.
About half way through i was thinking "... she's doing a Tom Scott".
Tom Scott has said he was heavily inspired by these kinds of older BBC programmes.
I thought of this too
1994 was the year of going outside and IRL,
2:37 Pretty wild they were already talking about fiber optic internet in 1994. I live in a rural area and we finally got fiber optic in 2022! Only 28 years after this video was originally aired. We had dial-up until 2007 then from 2007 to 2021 had a 3mbps connection. I'm sure there are still rural areas that can only get Satellite internet. Even when I only had dial-up I didn't really consider satellite a viable option. It was really expensive with a crazy low data cap. Something insane like 20GB a month, I'd use that in less than a day!