…asks Bryant Gumbel as he, Katie Couric, and an unnamed co-host try to decipher the @ symbol and figure out what “email” is in the aftermath of an earthquake in 1994. It’s a precious and hilarious peek into a moment that changed the world forever.
Found at Buzzfeed.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 30
Niki — January 31, 2011
Transcript?
T — January 31, 2011
That's awesome... That's went to college in 1994. It's crazy this think that in 17 years how much has changed. I had had a computer for a couple years in high school and even has a 9600 baud modem and even dialed into a few services. The information superhighway I tell ya! It wasn't until 1995 that my floormate showed me how to set up the proxy settings in Windows 3.1 so I could dial in and access the internet via the university. Fun stuff. The days when AOL was king!!
Ha!
No my Cablevision cable modem probably has close to the bandwidth the entire university library had in 1994.
Who remembers the Pine e-mail client... and, of course, "fingering" people. Heh heh.
abp — January 31, 2011
I believe that's Elizabeth Vargas (now of 20/20 and formerly the anchor of ABC World News Tonight).
admelfo — January 31, 2011
"Katie said she thought it was a ___________" -- a what??
Nice hair, Katie. ;)
EJP — January 31, 2011
I thought at the end- when they were talking about how people were afraid- they were saying that people are afraid of the internet. Fortunately(?) not, although that would have been much funnier.
Village Idiot — January 31, 2011
Just goes to show how up-to-date and "informative" the news can be. Or not. You'd think the news crew at a TV station that already has it's own email address would know a little something about what an email address is (wasn't it covered at a meeting or something?). Considering that these are the people who are supposed to be telling us what's going on in the world, the fact that they were clueless about email as late as 1994 does not inspire confidence.
After all, I was a moderator at an online forum back in 1989 (it wasn't connected to the series of tubes later named "the Internet" but it was online) and the first email message was sent/received in 1971, though some dispute this since personal electronic messages had been sent between researchers in the early to mid 60's, and the first "spam" (isn't that a meat product?) was sent in 1978!
So sixteen years after someone first got spam in their email inbox, NBC "News" was only just starting to catch on... sigh...
Kate — January 31, 2011
'Peek' not 'peak'. Sorry, I'm being That Person, who I hate, but I can't help myself.
Lindsay — January 31, 2011
I was born about a month after this. Incredible!
Ian Mallinson — January 31, 2011
Surely the ring is supposed to signify the internet tubes.
I was 4 at the time and had a better knowledge of what the internet was than this.
Jonathan — February 1, 2011
The other woman is Elizabeth Vargas.
Paige — February 1, 2011
Wow, it's incredible what all has happened in such a short amount of time, and how much it has affected our lives. I don't know what I would do without the internet!
Tom Stoppard — February 2, 2011
I got my first email account in 1994 as a student - it felt like the future, but then I had no idea of how much it would signal the beginning of a new world, and the end of an old one. Thanks for posting this clip, it made me laugh, and also a little sad.
Phone-free reflection « Chill. Seriously. — February 2, 2011
[...] two links about technology that she thought would be of interest to my blog readers. The first is a funny clip from the Today Show circa January 1994. The terminology and confusion surrounding the internet and email addresses is pretty amusing from [...]
DG — February 4, 2011
d'owhhh! The video's been removed. =p
Kat — February 7, 2011
The person who worked at NBC and uploaded the video has also been fired because of this.