email was Mac something something

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote: Allow me to explain my premise. What Linux did was allow any nerd to now have their own unix box. The next step was then to be able to take advantage of this crazy cool thing called the Internet. Primarily, the killer-app was Usenet and e-mail, but of course for nerds there was other wondrous stuff online. So now these nerds started seeking out ways that they could connect to the internet. The ease of having your own unix box drove that. Now, some of these nerds realized if they added an extra phone line they could give friends access to the internet through their box. Some realized they could SELL internet access to other people. In fact, I was an investor in a pretty early ISP in the Sacramento area that was started by a very young friend of mine, and is still thriving today. This begat the Mom&Pop ISP boom. Pretty soon, big companies like the Bells, Sprint, MCI, etc. started to take notice that people were making money selling access to the Internet. Within a couple years (1995ish) they started to jump on the bandwagon. Then began a huge influx of new users to this thing called e-mail and the internet and, very soon after that, the World Wide Web, that only a couple years before didn't even know this thing existed. The rest is history. My contention, and again, I can make a good argument (much better than this) if I had more time, but if Linux had not come around, the adoption of the internet by the public at large would have been a lot longer in coming. Linux was the lubrication that enabled quick penetration of internet into the mainstream. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]