Basically, while you are thinking "well, the internet is this thing that I'm looking at right now", I'm here to tell you it's way more than that. The Internet encompasses a whole array of data storage/retrieval/display/manipulation technologies, and the list is ever-growing all the time. And I'm also about to explain how and why to be careful on the internet....

The internet really did not take on the mainstream until the "World Wide Web" or "WWW" was created. This was basically WEBSITES. Today, it seems quaint, but back then, it was a big deal. And, websites were not as elaborate or varied as now. Back then, a website was pretty much a page (or webpage), or a series of webpages that contained text and graphics, and few, if any, interactive elements. That was it. The "information" was what you read in the text and saw in the images. The World Wide Web though is merely one-piece of the entire "internet". It's just the most used.

Of course, as the internet went on, and computers, networking, and so on got faster and faster, the things you could do with a website expanded exponentially. Basically, by 1998, we started to see interactive forms in the form of order forms, bidding websites (e-bay), online surveys and quizzes, and as Java and Flash took over, video games and interactive exhibits also started to appear in miniscule numbers. By 2000, we had "Blogs" which were interactive forms where you could post up diaries - LiveJournal anybody? By 2005, internet VIDEO started to take off, and by 2010, STREAMING became the norm for most households vs. Cable Television or reading. Social Media was an amaglamation of all of these interactive forms online, and internet video and pictures, and basically started to kill off or obscurify any pre-existing methods because of Social Media's ease of use by your average, dumb, American teenager.

Which brings us to today. Internet isn't just e-mail and Facebook, the old WWW is still there. It's just that the internet mimics real life, but to an extreme. Let's talk about that and internet Safety next.

I'd say the decline of the internet as a place habitable by people into technology started as early as 1998. See, the internet, Pentium Processor, 14.4K and later 33.6K, and lastly 56K V.90 dial-up, and Windows 95, were the things that made the tech landscape of the 90's what it was. It was technology driving culture. You had new, better, faster, cheaper resources, and those resources put it in reach of more people. If we were still using DOS, configuring our Modem settings using plaintext ini files, and having to make sense of data rendered in 80x25 column text mode - the mainstream wouldn't have cared or wanted it. The general public likes "pretty pictures" and interesting user interfaces, not logic and reason.

I'd say the first sign of anything amiss would have been NAPSTER. I know, I know, all you millennial kids are going to whine and complain that I'm one of those lame "late stage capitalists" who "does it for money, not music" because I'm speaking of your once favorite piracy vector with disdain. But let's get honest here. Why did ANYONE in the lamestream with a basic b**** level knowledge of music care about: Elvis Presely, Buddy Holly, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Van-Halen, Journey, ZZ Top, Nirvana, SOundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Metallica.....well, because they MAKE LOTS OF FUCKIN' MONEY, THAT'S WHY!! The yardstick of success, in the mainstream, is money. That's it. And the reason you USED NAPSTER - is because you don't/didn't have the infinite money supply to afford the music being downloaded, even at $0.99 apiece as it is now. While many - myself included - are interested in free things on the internet because of either preservation (like software, old video games, or out-of print albums, manuals, books, and other useful stuff that make the Internet Archive a real Alexandrian Library), or because those things are just made of unobtainium. THe majority of the lamestream uses our actual, useful, legitimate purposes as an excuse to be pirates. This in turn draws the ire of the REAL villans in this story, the corporations that run all these things. Who then turn it around to "well, we can get more money if we rent it out for a smaller amount, and then tell you you can't own it so we can sway the market to appease our shareholders and the government". See how this is kind of a larger, interconneced series of degradation.

The next sign was the growing need for T.O.S. - or "Terms of Service" agreements, even for some of the most stupid stuff. This grew out of the fact that a bunch of mental babies (some of which may have been actual babies) got on the internet and start what we now call being a "Internet Troll". Because you're sitting behind a screen, on a screen name of something like "RatBastard1982" or "DanTheGarbageMan42069" and basically being an asshole to people on the internet because you think it's funny, fun, or like I am guilty of in the past - you're just fucking angry with society and it's bullshit and wish things would change. The problem is, people like RatBastard or Dan the Garbageman were just throwing out purposeless hurt because they can't come to grips with their own insecurities, while guys like me piss off the C-suite, shareholders, and government lobbyists because it means they have to get off their fat Armani asses and actually DO SOMETHING about things rather than sit around feeding us horseshit about how we're being "immature" and "this is systematically incorrect because (insert bullshit reason here)" - because they know they are wrong and we are right....which leads me to the rampant abuse of the English language.....but first...

Let's elaborate on the NAPSTER situation a little bit because it's also important that this is the beginning of a big part of Internet Security from a USER standpoint. See, ever notice that all of the strip clubs, bars, and other seedy, somewhat sexual places in town, are all located in some place that looks a bit rough, and would probably make your average HOA lead frightened. I'm talking about internet p*rn and the rise of it around this time. See, the users of such sites figured that your mom, dad, or wife, or husband, would not know enough about how computers work to know there's an entire cache on your hard drive with almost every picture you have looked at (and those you didn't look at even), saved to it. And that cache is in some obscure folder off to the side where you'd never look, or save a document, or do anything. Business knows this seedy nature, so they can leverage our next paragraph - ADVERTISING - or even malicious forms of advertising known as spyware or malware, as a way to keep you going down the rabbit hole of holes until your computer might as well have bullet holes in it because that's about as good as it will run with all that crap on there. Warez sites did the same thing - as a freelancer, I'd say 90% of my job at that time, was cleaning up people's cache's of porn, and removing viruses on their computers due to warez. Fun stuff...NOT! About the closest thing you'll ever see to being a Septic Tank Sucker as an I.T. Guy!

Over the course of the seventies, the "nodes" ie. the entry-points to the internet were expanded to include scientific companies and organizations (NASA, ATARI, Texas Instruments probably - just to name a few), some colleges (places like Harvard or M.I.T.), government organizations of course, and whatnot.

In the eighties, 1983 to be exact, E-mail - the standard system we still use today to communicate in text via places like Yahoo!, Google, ProtonMail, or Microsoft Outlook, was developed. This is when some people consider the internet "really" starting since e-mail is one of the core technologies we still use today.

Then in 1989, TIm Berner's Lee developed a system for making visually enhanced documents called "Hyper-Text Markup Language" or HTML - which is the CORE of what we call the "World Wide Web", and the core of what most people today consider "the internet" in general - though that's a bit of a misnomer. Tim's creation was invented for the "Free exchange of information" - ie, you get on a computer, connect to the internet, and visit a collection of these HTML "pages" known as a "Website" to get information from. Of course, governments, science, and society saw this a real benefit (that's how they get ya' hooked), and so the investing began, with some of the biggest investing coming from the Democrat party via Al Gore, who invested in infrastructure to allow for the internet to be expanded and made faster to make it more feasable for business and personal use with a growing user-base. That's where that whole "he invented the internet" lie got started, because America has a real problem with calling INVESTORS ...InVENTors. Think about it, Ballmer, Musk, Jobs....these guys had money and charisma, not technical skills, that was all Paul Allen, Wozniak, and the hired ENGINEERS who made the products, not a guy in snazzy attire with a loud voice with a big paycheck and a sense of humor.

AS the internet grew and became more MAINSTREAM - very important because Technology is an EXCELLENT teacher for how the mainstream consumeroids and consumertards ruin everything - it got clogged with more problems generated by peopel who don't understand technology, business, how it impacts other people, business, government, society, and whatnot. That's how we ended up with no music industry, a few years of people having their lives ruined trading MP3s of major label bands on the internet, and why we have no new rock artists naymore with awesome music - rock didn't die with Nirvana, it died with NAPSTER. That's how we ended up with software companies doing more and more damning things to tell us WHAT we can and cannot do with the digital devices we own and have in OUR OWN HOUSES because some moron has 80 copies of Windows XP out in the wild from sharing the CD, or someone at work thinks installing Hero Legend somehow counts as "productivity". On top of it, mroe and more idiots who don't want to learn how to "compute" - even the simplest of things such as turning the damn thing on or off or realizing why having an operating system that tells you how the corporation that made it wants you to do thing is a bad thing - is largely ignored by what I like to call the lamestream. Also, as more of these couch potatoes with a keyboard and mouse continued to join the internet, we saw a loss of "Nettiquite", an increase in trolls, shitposting, flame wars, and in general, poor netsmanship, and as Social Media made anyone able to act like a Narcisscistic Troll via social media without the skills to even use a can opener, things just got even worse. And Marketing has taken over every square megabyte of it and started shoving ADS down our damn throats left and right hoping to suck our wallets dry - hence why I'm a supporter of Bill Hicks....it may have been a joke, bit was also a great idea.