Word: webbed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...alliances, seeking treasure and so on. But the Net has advanced the form considerably since the halcyon days of Dungeons & Dragons, the original game played by dateless dweebs in rec rooms across America on Saturday nights. Today's fantasy worlds are designed by software gurus, are presented on the Web and swarm with tens of thousands of players. The result is virtual societies like Ultima Online, which in two years amassed 125,000 players so fervent that pieces of exclusive real estate on the Ultima site--think of it as the Ultima in-game equivalent of a duplex on Manhattan...
Luckily, the consumer in need of a home robot has a more affordable (and potentially more useful) choice: Cye, a "personal robot" created by Probotics Inc., based in Pittsburgh, Pa. About the size of a toaster oven, Cye made its debut on the Web www.personalrobots.com) where it goes for $695. An optional vacuum cleaner and wagon add size and dollars...
...which makes Paul Maidman, a.k.a. Fryz, roll his eyes. Maidman used to hang out with gH, but now he's 18 and has long since outgrown such shenanigans. "I don't like Web-page hacking," he says. "It's too easy. It's the younger kids who do it--13- or 14-year-olds. As time goes on, you realize you don't really gain anything...
Anyway, setup was a snap, done wirelessly in minutes. The Palm's built-in 8,000-bits-per-second modem is way slower than today's 56-kbps standard, but 3Com made up for it by creating a low-bandwidth, mostly graphics-free way to search the Web. Indeed, on the VII you don't browse the Web, you "clip" it. Palm users can visit only participating websites (so far, a few hundred have signed up) rather than the entire Web. While I was at first offended at this idea--the Internet is meant to be open and free...
...more about the TIME 100, visit time.com/time100 on the Web...