A better way to phrase it is: The birth of the internet (1969) is closer to the birth of television (1927) than it is to today.
The birth of the internet and the birth of the world wide web are two differnet things though: The world wide web started in 1989.
Why do I have August 6, 1991 on my mind for “the world wide web switches on”?
That was the day he opened it up to the world. 1989 was when he got it working at CERN, and it was released into the public domain in 1993.
If you think about it, every tech is just radio. And I don’t just mean cellular, wifi, and bluetooth, There are few things on an SoC that aren’t just refinements and miniaturizations of radio tech.
IMO modulation is wildly different than radio.
It’s all based on the same mathematical model. And since it’s not profitable to make real progress in technology when you’re already making money from it, it’s all a very similar concept of the same technology. Capitalism sure is swell 🙃
Interesting that there has yet to be a ‘new’ media to supplant internet. I wonder what it would look like
I feel like this is a false equivalence. Rather than compare the web to TV or radio I think it’s more accurate to regard the internet as a medium then compare that to RF transmission. Just as we went from text communication (Morse code) to audio transmission to video transmission over radio waves, we’ve gone from email to RealPlayer to Youtube and beyond.
I do find it somewhat ironic that television evolved from over-the-air broadcast to direct-connect cable, while internet technologies have gone from landlines to WIFI and 5G.
TV is largely now just IP anyways so in a way we’re kinda back.
5G internet is only really a thing because it’s so much easier to run fiber to one tower. Than to broadcast it out for miles than it is to run fiber to everyone’s doorstep. We switched from OTA to cable mostly because OTA sucked. But now that we’ve figured out long range, high bandwith, and most importantly high reliability RF we’re happy to use it. But for most people their internet will stay wired because it’s still the most reliable and fastest. The only people I know that use 5G home internet are in rural areas where the wired options suck, and my one co worker that’s just a cheap ass and he hates it.
Chiming in to say the 5G home internet I have is great. Cheaper and faster than broadband. Live in a metropolitan area. Wish fiber was an option, still.