This charming video from the 1994 Today Show features Bryant Gumbel and a stylin’ Katie Couric (along with another host I don’t recognize) talking about this newfangled thing they don’t quite understand, the Internet. The conversation starts with a discussion about how to pronounce “@” and then bends into what in retrospect seems truly strange when Gumbel doesn’t know to pronounce the “dot” in an email address.
If Gumbel thought pronouncing “@” sounded strange, we can only speculate what he would have thought if he’d been told we’d all soon be saying things like “yahoo,” “google,” and “tweet.”
While these three struggle to understand something futuristic, a funny comment on the source video on YouTube asks just as innocently, “What’s a Katie Couric?”
Happy Friday!
(Sobering postscript — NBC, showing an appalling lack of common sense and sense of humor, has fired the person who first posted this video. Bad show, NBC.)
Discussion
3 Thoughts on ""It Sounded Stupid When I Said It" — The Today Show Encounters the Internet ala 1994"
I think the third person might be Elizabeth Vargas, who now co-hosts 20/20.
A Washington Post reporter is stating that the NBC employee who posted this clip has been fired:
http://gizmodo.com/5752028/nbc-employee-fired-for-leaking-today-shows-embarrassing-internet-cluelessness
