Part 3/15:
Drawing parallels with the early days of the internet, Antonopoulos recounted the story of Usenet in 1989, a discussion system that used low-speed dial-up lines and stored-and-forward messaging. At that time, experts predicted internet capacity would become insufficient—predicting that messaging traffic would outpace the ability to transmit data, leading to an impending “crash.”
The fundamental problem was capacity: the internet had to evolve from dial-up modems to high-speed dedicated lines, with optimizations such as dedicated circuits, advanced hardware, and eventually the advent of commercial high-speed fiber optics. These upgrades allowed the network to continue accommodating expanding demands—email, multimedia, web browsing—without collapsing.