From the Every Once In A While A Blind Sow Finds An Acorn Department:
The knuckleheads over at iOwnTheWorld.com found this remarkable 1994 clip from the Today Show in which Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble reveal that they don’t have a clue what that internet thingy is. They don’t know what that little @ sign means, either. But they do know that people in Los Angeles are sleeping with their shoes on.
The money quote over at iOwnTheWorld.com is, “These people who posture and preen for a living, as if they are insightful and knowledgeable, are amazingly ignorant when they go off script.”
We think they were talking about Gumbel and Couric, but if you’ve ever visited IOTW you’ll know that may well have been talking about themselves.
H/T: iOwnTheWorld.com
This post was last modified on January 26, 2021
View Comments (22)
In 1994 I was using not only the internet, I was using intranet to order parts and supplies for the military, using those old slow PC's and still dreaming of video editing with the Amiga I wanted...till they went out of business soon after...lol...as soon as I could I had my first AOL account in 1995, and never looked back. I can't see how I, a simple mechanic could have outpaced the high and mighty knowalls on GMA!
Exactly. Wasn't AOL sending out a floppy disk a day by 1994? AOL is like the internet for retards and I'm pretty sure that by 1994 I had a real ISP (not AOL) and was using IRC pretty regularly.
Thats like somebody asking about what netflix is right now. Sure, not everybody has it or knows what its all about but its certainly making waves and you'd have to be living under a rock to not have heard of it.
Wonder why they just didn't call up Al Gore, the inventor?
An excellent point you make, Raymundo.
I knew people that didn't know what the internet was in 94. Many people... especially people in their late 30s/40s and above. 17 years ago may not be that long ago for some people, but it was still...17 years ago.
The internet has just started ot be known out side of "geek" circles in 94. Sure a good portion of the US knew about it, but a good portion did not.
Now if you had this same video with the same comments taped last week...that would be funny. But bringing something out from the early 90s? Not so much.
I think it does show how much more our country is connected now than it was 17 years ago though.
Were these people you speak of hosts on a national news-related show, where they are promoted as bright people who know "what's going on" in the world?
No, but the Today show has always been clueless when it comes to technology. Tech has often had a weird place in "mainstream." Often it is ignored despite the changes it might bring or lauded and expected to do things that are still years or decades off.
I've never been a fan of the hosts here but I also realize in 94 there were still people, even those that were suppose to be smarter then us (heh) that didn't know about it. Who knows, it could've been just for show - Not that news outlets would ever do something like that to the common rabble - but it could've been for real. Maybe they were so involved in their own selves that they didn't even own a computer? Who knows.
I dunno. I just didn't really find this post humorous. My brother did though, he posted it on his face book XD.
Of course since I am conservative, I won't stop visiting this site just because one article doesn't really do anything for me. If I were liberal you could expect me to start degrading this site on this forum and others heh.
HEY!
"...I’ve never been a fan of the hosts here but I also realize..."
What? Here at IHTM my brothers and sisters rather appreciate the incredible people that are Ed & Ad. Don't be going all "not a fan" here like that.
--------------------
I was a Compuserve user for a year or two, USENET was the collection of sites that I was dangling my lure in back in 91 and forward. Then algore hit the Eureka! button on his KYBD and invented the Internet. When was that? It coincided with the intro of "www", as I recall. I blame it all on DARPA, our great friends with all those cool ideas. Oh, yeah... and algore too.
XD the hosts of the Today Show, not of this site. I like this site - you can look back and see many snarky comments on many articles :P
I much apperciate both Ed and Ad - they have put up a site that conservatives can both laugh and vent on. Just thought I'd clear that up. I can't remember how I discovered this site, but I am glad I did.
We know you do. Appreciate your contributions.
But your brother has a better sense of humor. :)
Oh I don't think so...my sense of humor is like rapier - sharp, edgy, and used by very flamboyant men!
...no wait that didn't come out right....
And my humor is what? Shock and AWE baby! SHOCK AND AWE!!!!!
Big deal, who cares? In 1994 I had never heard of the "internet" either. I didn't own a computer until about 1998 or so. I didn't have a cell phone until about the same time, 1998 or 1999, and it was a company supplied phone. My now ex-wife had to drag me into the 21st century, kicking and screaming all the way.
I knew what the internet was at that point. Was logging on to BBS'es (bulletin boards) to surf ASCII porn with my 14-4 baud modem.
"AT" was the key command required to get the two modems to complete a connection. America Online and CompUServ wrote apps to simplify the connection process because Windows (if you actually used it) didnt do it automatically.
Ah the good old days of BBS! Had one of my own running a Commodore 64 with a whopping 300 baud modem! It was old school...only one computer could dial in at a time. Had almost 150 unique users at my peak. Was put out of business by the kid a few blocks over who got an Amiga with a 1200 baud modem. I always found his friend the most annoying though, as he always put down Commodore's and was always hyping this computer he got called an IBM PC. He swore that the architecture of the computer's chips was going to revolutionize not just BBSs, but the computing world. Guess he was right.....
For those of us even slightly tuned in to BBSs, AOL, Compuserve, et al....it was plain to see that a revolution in telecommunication was coming. For clueless morons like Gumbel and Couric, they were more tuned in to liberal politics and the latest in NY fashion. Hence their utter befuddlement at the most basic of program coding.
If you look up the term "educated idiot", you might expect to find the word oxymoron in the explanation. But much to your surprise, you will see Bryant Gumbel's picture.
The term I like is from "Thing Fish" by Frank Zappa: "Over-educated sh*t-head."
I really don't see why peopel are getting all riled up. We're talking about 1994 not 2004. In 1994 there was no "Internet". Bill Clinton talked about The Internet in his 1994 SOTU address and nobody really knew what he meant. The only people that did know were students in College. At that time I had 28.8K modem and the school dial up with 14.4K. We had two line in to a test server running VERY early Linux (Slack 1.0) and had very basic service, mostly some Gopher holes, Archie servers and other things none of you have heard of. The concept of an ISP was unheard of, and it wasn't until mid 1995 that one of the guys at my school who was behind the test server set up the first ISP in town, which is now serving all of California to this day.
Outside of the lab nobody was even using Mosaic (Netscape had yet to be invented) and HTML was very very drab. There wasn't much to see anyway. It was all very new. It wasn't until 1995 that we started playing with SLIP connections over dialup and other methods to being actual TCP/IP to our machines remotely. It was far form being easy in the early days of 1994 and 1995.
My point is that I would love to laugh at Katie and Bryant for this. However in 1994 EVERYONE was wondering what the Internet was.
In 1994 at the latest, I had registered a domain name, and hired a kid to create a web site for my business. I ultimately sold the domain name to IBM for $7,000 by 1995 at the latest. Many people in the computer industry went to our site.
Al Gore and other computer scientists invented the internet in 1969. At that time is was just for the military. In 1972, an early form of email was introduced. File transfers began in 1973. In 1985 the first domain name was assigned, and in 1993 Network Solutions began the first public company to manage domain names. In 1991 the first menu interface to the internet was introduced. Netscape, the first modern web browser was available in 1994 and went public in 1995 and it was a HUGE story (not just 1995, but in the preceding year) In fact, Amazon was founded in 1994 and sold it's first book online in July 1995.
So yes, while these two idiots would not have had reason to use the internet, if they ever read a newspaper or serious magazine, they would have known about the internet and even the @ sign.
You said, "However in 1994 EVERYONE was wondering what the Internet was." You are correct. Everyone but Couric and Gumble.
We may not have known or understood the specifics of this thing we were hearing about at the time. But I watched the news back then as much as I do now, and I have to to tell you that I knew in theory what it was back in 92... because of the news reports of a coming information super highway. By 1994, I had been on AOL as had many people I knew like myself, who were not computer geeks by any means.
Gumbel and Couric have always thought they were cutting edge elitists who knew more than the commoners they were hired to inform on a daily basis, but they didn't know what the coming technology of the future was when it was being implemented?
I think you are giving them way too much credit here.
...if you’ve ever visited IOTW you’ll know that may well have been talking about themselves.
That's not as comedic as you may think. I used to frequent that site and ran into what may be the most seriously disturbed and anti-social person I've yet encountered on the Internet.
Instead of banning her for her caustic ramblings, they gave her a little feature spot. Weird.
Pfft...like nobody knew the internet was the largest network of electronic pornography sites with and occasional FTP or email servers sprinkled in by 1994.
Brayant didn't know it could do things other than find porn.