dated/1997

You knew there was going to be more of it. You just couldn't be sure what <it> was.

That's what it was like in 1997, with <the net>, in Sheffield's Cultural Industries Quarter - the CIQ. A series of video and text anecdotes <dated/1997> told the stories of clusters of small and micro-enterprises: where they had been on-line; and where they thought they were going.

Real multimedia on the Internet still seemed like a distant prospect. Only the most patient and committed users would be willing to wait 10 or more minutes while grainy video clips downloaded via normal dial-up connections. So by the time most people could see them, the video clips in <dated/1997> were bound to look dated!

By the end of the NEO Project (1995-97), three quarters of the CIQ's organisations were on-line. The infrastructure was shifting: REGIS offered ISDN links, with cable modems promised soon, and the Wired Workplace initiative was installing linked Local Area Networks in the Science and Technology Parks and the Workstation. The Network Users' Forum provided a channel for exchanging ideas and on-line experiences.

From 1997's vantage point, networked multimedia might have been about to take off in the CIQ. Or it could have been a cul-de-sac, if it turned out, say, that only global media corporations could afford the investment required. As NEO "signed off", the glimpses it captured on video seem hopeful in the main. The people telling these stories depend only on their ideas to stand out. Now see how these ideas stand up with hindsight.