Today Show hosts were clueless about the Internet in 1994

The Internet has become such an integral part of most people's daily lives, that it's easy to forget how recent it actually is. In this hilarious clip from January 1994, Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric seem to be completely clueless about what the Internet and basic things like email are.

While the Internet has roots going back to 1969, at the time of this clip the World Wide Web part that most of us now think of as the Internet was only about three years old. In December 1993 there was a grand total of 623 web sites and about one million people online worldwide.

The part I don't get is when they talk about people communicating by email following the 1994 Northridge earthquake because you "don't need a phone line." In 1994 dial-up was pretty much the only way for regular folks to get online other than going to some big institution with a T1 line.

The internet is pretty much a series of tubes. Put stuff in one side and it comes out the other, right?

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