alt Hacker NewsYou people drunk on LLM kool aid forget that some of us are old enough to remember those years.
I do.
I worked as an installer for an ISP in 1995. Yes, it did exist. I remember the excitement of small business owners for getting it. No one needed explanation that instantly sending editable files over email is a game changer for many small firms. Previously you could either fax which was not editable or you needed to courier which was expensive and while overnight was possible it was even more expensive and still much slower than just email.
So yes, it created positive value the very moment you would open Eudora or Pegasus and press Send.
It didn't require hundreds of billions of capex. It required someone to set up shop with a PC, a serial card and a couple modems.
>> You people drunk on LLM kool aid forget that some of us are old enough to remember those years. I do.
>> It didn't require hundreds of billions of capex. It required someone to set up shop with a PC, a serial card and a couple modems.
This is a bad faith comparison. Those small business owners who gained access to the internet benefited from decades of research by military and research institutions, as well as massive amounts of infrastructure spending by telcos. That spending really started to pick up near the end of 1995. Between 1996 and 2001, North America collectively spent $1 trillion on the Internet buildout.