This three-minute promotional video from Digital Equipment Corporation produced in 1994 sure takes me back. At that time people were using 14.4kbps Modems to dial into an Internet service provider and read pages on the Web. And the number of sites was only in the hundreds or possibly thousands.

Compare that to today… there are 160 Million sites and I visit them on my 10,000kbps (10 Mbps) cable connection (a 700x increase!). My house has more bandwidth than the backbone in 1994!

One of the choice quotes from this video:

In the future you will be forced to compete with distant companies you’ve never encountered before, and you’ll be able to expand to new markets at low cost.

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Here’s a question I received from a reader:

Can you recommend a good hard drive sweeper? I need to clean up my PC at work… been surfing the net a little too much.

Well yes. Yes I can…
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On October 8, 1993 CBS ran the following news article entitled A network called ‘Internet’. It’s fascinating to look back at the early days, and I recall them very well. In fact, by the time this video aired I had been online for years, and had even been selling PCs with modems and Internet connectivity via CompuServe and Prodigy since 1990.

In the earliest days of consumer Internet adoption, the first big ISP was CompuServe. It was not unusual in the early 1980s to have to pay a $30-per-hour charge (that would be $21,600 per month!) for a dial-up connection speed of 1200 bps. That’s just over 1 Kb - on a good day - as compared to our current broadband connections that normally exceed 1,500,000 bps or 1,250 times the original speed.
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People routinely ask about my favorite software so, I’ve decided to gather all my top picks in one place to make every one’s life a little easier.

All of the software listed here is free for personal use, meaning:

1. Any of this software can be installed and used at absolutely no charge, forever. There is no nagging, spyware, or anything else nasty.
2. Because it’s totally free, sometimes there is very little support. You either figure out how to use it, or just get rid of it.

So, without further ado, here is the list categorized by type of application:
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According to CNN, who is quoting Netcraft - the Neilson’s of the Internet world - the Web just topped the 100 million domain name marker.

Additionally, Time Magazine says that Technorati is claiming that 100,000 new blogs are created each day with over 1.3 million posts added daily.
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