The ever-curious Lawyers, Guns and Money blog claims today, more or less, as the arrival of The Internet.
[W]hen did people in general start using the internet exactly? This doesn’t have an exact answer, it turns out, but after a little internet research I think a roughly accurate answer is that in 1994 very few people were on the internet, and by 1997 the vast majority of non-geriatric college-educated people were on it regularly, so September 1, 1995 is a good birthday more or less.
Yes there was an internet earlier than that. But those dates work for me. In 1995 I was writing the history of Law Society of Upper Canada on a commission, and the society provided me with a cubicle in their archives to enable my progress. (The book that resulted is still in print and much admired; you should read it.)
As part of being a temporary person-around-Osgoode Hall, I acquired my first email address.
You can see how unfamiliar all this internet stuff was by that address: cmoore@educ.lsuc.on.ca ".Ca" is the familiar Canada ending, but the new email administrators at the Law Society added ".on" for Ontario, ".lsuc" for the Law Society, and "educ" for its education department, hope to the archives. They wouldn't today, and anyway it's now The Law Society of Ontario.
I did quite a bit of emailing from that clunky address, but I got my own one fairly promptly. By then both cmoore and chrism were taken at the service provider I was dealing with, the late (lamented?) Interlog, so I seized on cmed, in honour of the fact that I had almost simultaneously incorporated as Christopher Moore Editorial Ltd. and it seemed short was good. I was quicker getting to www.christophermoore.ca
(The LGM post also muses thoughtfully about the history of how things become timeless, just part of the landscape. I am old enough to remember a time before personal computers, and even a time before television, and I do recall the novelty of the introduction of each. (Computers: I typed the manuscripts of my first two books. Television: we lived in a small town in the British Columbia mountains -- you could buy a TV but getting channels was a problem.)
I wrote a piece about the arrival of the Internet in Canada, which you could find in the Canada's History online archives here: Canada's History Dec 2010-Jan 2011 at page 46. Did'ja know the whole corpus of The Beaver and Canada's History over more than a century can be searched there?
