by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

I am old enough to remember what life was like prior to the commercial use of the Internet, and the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) which made the Internet graphical and interactive, rather than just text-based.

My first access to the Internet came in the early 1990s, when I was working as an English professor at a University in Saudi Arabia. The university’s computer network ran on Unix, and was connected to other academic networks around the world on a network called “Bitnet” at that time.

The Internet was just getting started in academic circles, whereas previous to that the Internet was primarily only used by the military.

The Internet is originally a product of the U.S. DoD and ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), developed in the late 1950s and 1960s.

This was the Cold War period, and the idea was that if the U.S. had a distributed network of “nodes” that were all interconnected, then having one part of the network attacked or bombed would not take down the entire network.

I taught myself Unix and learned how to use the Bitnet network that my university was using to connect to the Internet, which was rapidly being expanded in the area of academics at that time and starting to replace the older network systems, such as Bitnet. I primarily used the Listserv function to join discussion groups with people around the world on various topics that I could not otherwise research while living in Saudi Arabia.

I clearly remember the day where I learned how to use “Telnet“, which allowed me to literally log in to another computer half way around the world, and view that computer’s file structure, and even open and read files.

It didn’t have much practical use since the files were all technical files on various computer topics, but just being on another computer in another part of the world in REAL time, was fascinating, and intoxicating.

I knew then that this technology was going to change the world and how we communicate and share data.

When my contract at the university ended in 1995, the World Wide Web was just getting going, but at that time it was not allowed in Saudi Arabia.

So my family and I returned to the U.S., as I feared that the technology was developing too rapidly for me to stay in Saudi Arabia, and that I would miss out on this new, emerging technology that was rapidly transforming society, and was based in the U.S.

I passed up an opportunity to advance in my own career in CAEL (Computer Assisted English Learning), as a colleague of mine in Saudi Arabia had connections with a very wealthy Sheikh in another Arab Gulf country who wanted to hire me to develop computer English courses.

I switched from teaching English to teaching the technology, and the hot ticket in 1995 in the U.S. was Microsoft’s first truly 32-bit operating system that finally could compete with Apple’s OS, “Windows 95”.

In the mid to late 1990s I became certified to train people and schools in the new Microsoft networking suite of products which were in high demand. The pay was great, and the demand to learn these new products was quickly exceeding the trainers needed to train people on them, and I soon had my own company where I recruited my best students to become trainers also.

Y2K

Then came the awareness in the late 1990s that a simple date code on computers could threaten to take down all of this new technology that our society was rapidly becoming dependent upon.

The issue was that many computers only used two digits for the year (e.g. 1/1/97 for January 1, 1997.), the last two digits. So 1998 was 98, 1999 was 99, etc.

But what was going to happen in the year 2000, where the last two digits would be 00? Would the computers interpret that as 1900, and if so, what was going to happen?

Nobody really knew, but the results could have been catastrophic, because our society had become so dependent upon the technology in such a short period of time.

As I began to investigate the Y2K problem, I began to learn just how fragile our society had become by rapidly adopting the technology. Supply chains, for example, were developed on JIT (just in time) inventory to reduce costs and overhead, and I quickly saw that it would not take much to bring down the whole system through a rapidly cascading series of problems in the technology.

And at this point, the commercial use of the Internet by consumers through the Web was just getting started, and not even a factor yet.

It was the business, government, and academic sectors that had the most exposure to computer failures.

Our family decided to just move to the Philippines in 1998 and ride out Y2K there, as we moved to a rural location that was agriculturally based and had very little technology. This was the area where my then-wife had grown up, and although the area had electricity, it was frequently down and the people knew how to get along with major disruptions to the grid.

We were living on a mountain, and phone service had only extended there the year before we had arrived, and most of the people did not even have it yet, as it was expensive.

The people went to town once a week on market day to buy products produced locally, and fish that was brought in from the coastal areas.

We knew that all of that would survive if the technology went down, and that life would go on much the same as it had been since the end of World War II in 1940s when the Philippines were “liberated” from the Japanese.

So I went from training people on the technology to farming in the tropics, learning all about Philippine small-scale agriculture, Philippine herbs, and coconut oil.

Y2K came and passed without much fanfare, but we never regretted the choices we made as a family back then, and our children got to learn the native language and culture that their mother grew up in.

The U.S. spent about $100 billion in fixing the date code errors on computers in the late 1990s, and a disaster was averted, although the issue is still highly debated today as to whether or not all that money spent was worth it.

Y24K?

After the year 2000 is when the Internet really took off as a commercial application for the masses.

In the beginning, the frenzy over all the possibilities and ways to make money off of the Internet was so great, that investors made very foolish investments in everything and anything that was being marketed on the Internet, and the dot-com financial crash quickly followed in 2001-2002.

I stared my own ecommerce business during this time, which still exists today 22 years later.

Here in 2024, the U.S., and the World, depend upon the Internet and technology so much that it makes the year 2000 look like it was in the dark ages.

We have entire generations now who have been born into this technology, and do not know any other way of life. Most just blindly trust that this technology and the Internet will always be there for us.

Most people cannot even imagine or fathom what life would be like today without the Internet.

Total e-commerce sales for 2023 were estimated at $1.1 TRILLION in the U.S., an increase of 7.6 percent (±1.2%) from 2022. (Source.)

If the Internet went down for just 1 day, it would result in a loss of $11 billion in the U.S., and about $43 billion worldwide, just for ONE day. (Source.)

If the Internet went down for just a few days to a week, our economy would totally collapse.

If the Internet went down for a month, society would collapse.

This is not exaggeration or hyperbole. People who understand the technology know that this is true.

This is why the Globalists, such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), have been warning the public since late 2020 that a “Cyber Pandemic” and “Cyber Attack” are coming that will make COVID-19 look like a walk in the park.

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Via https://healthimpactnews.com/2024/are-you-prepared-for-life-with-no-internet/