2000: Half of United States households have internet access, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Nielsen is best known for measuring the popularity of a certain other mass medium that went viral a half-century earlier. How fitting that this paradigm shift came with fin-de-siècle serendipity to a millennium that had already witnessed staggering technological advancement.

Not since television transformed the world in the early 1950s had anything entered the collective consciousness as quickly or pervasively as the internet, which began its life 40 years earlier as "Arpanet," a relatively humble military experiment. (In Wired.com style, BTW, "internet" — even "the internet" — is lower case.)

Like television, experiencing the internet initially required the procurement of expensive, finicky equipment. And as in TV's earliest days there wasn't much to see. One internet service provider (ISP) even playfully reminded us of the limits of the net in a TV ad during which a menacing voice told a web surfer: "You have reached the end of the internet. Please go back."

But there were more than enough chickens and eggs to rapidly make e-mail, instant messaging and web surfing all-consuming and utterly necessary to daily existence — or a pointless time suck. Acceptance of the new medium reached critical mass even faster than TV had: It took nine years for the boob tube to go from virtually nothing to being a fixture in 50 percent of households, while the internet achieved that milestone with three years to spare.

By 2000, a mere six years after the internet became available to the general public, we were still giddy and expectant, and not yet seduced by the virtual intimacies of Facebook and Twitter.

Here, timing was everything. Online services had been around for years — CompuServe was founded in 1969, and became the nation's largest private membership network in the '80s. The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (aka "The Well") was one of the first virtual communities when it was founded in 1985, followed by thousands of single-topic electronic bulletin boards (BBSs).

The public's imagination had been sparked by the prospect of an "Information Superhighway" with an on-ramp available from the comfort of every living room. But getting around was an exercise in mutual exclusivity: To hang out at your favorite videogame BBS, for example, you had to hang up on AOL.

So, for the post-MTV generation the wide open spaces of the internet became the great connectivity equalizer — letting us visit multiple destinations simultaneously just as we became enamored with online table-hopping.

It was like throwing fuel on the fire. Nielsen now estimates that 75 percent of the nation is online, and nearly half have broadband access to the internet. The latest e-race is in wireless mobile computing, using small devices like netbooks and tiny ones like the iPhone. The number of sites is uncountable. There is no industry, profession or avocation which does not rely on the internet to gather or distribute data, or both.

And of of this has all happened during the lifetime of someone who would now be a high school sophomore.

Here in 2009, I cannot help remembering what it was like in 1994 when the first "pure internet" ISPs set up shop. I quit AOL for Earthlink, which provided a static IP address — you are a node on the internet! — and made it possible to choose the online tools you wanted rather than use only those the online services provided. That was an absolute must for a curious early adopter.

One morning I was having trouble, and called Earthlink. A woman answered in two rings, and when I asked for tech support, she said: "He's not in yet. He gets in at 10. Do you want him to call you?"

Tech support was one person. And he did call, at 10:03.

Tell me again: How far have we progressed?

Source: Various

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