We take it for granted. When we need to know something, we “Google” it. (And when did “Google” become a verb? No idea.) We set up doctors’ appointments on it, make travel plans, manage our finances, do our Christmas (and other) shopping, and increasingly many of us perform our jobs using it. It’s hard to believe it’s only been around for 30 years. The worldwide web is so meshed into our everyday lives, we feel helpless when we don’t have access to it.
It’s hard to believe that some of us are old enough to remember when it didn’t exist, when researching anything meant dipping into your encyclopedia or a trip to the library, when you wrote letters to communicate with people rather than sending emails or texts.
Most people think the worldwide web and the internet are the same thing, but it’s not so. The internet existed well before the worldwide web. The internet originated almost simultaneously in 1969 with the National Physical Laboratory in the UK’s Mark 1 network and the U.S. Defense Department’s ArpaNet. The concept of interlocking networks of networked computers was intriguing enough that universities and scientific research facilities wanted in and eventually the networks spread. Even before the worldwide web, email (which runs on a completely different set of network protocols from the web), bulletin boards, and Usenet libraries were in wide use, especially in universities and among hobbyists.
Then came the bulletin board services intended for public use: CompuServe, Prodigy, and a little later AOL. These pre-dated the web itself but led the way in showing the public how useful a network could be by providing access to huge databases of information and facilitating contact among people with shared interests. Eventually those services turned into on-ramps for the web that made it accessible to everyone.
There’s some debate about the actual birth date of the worldwide web, but some experts place it in March 1989 when CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee unveiled the "Mesh" system of hypertext links bringing together any form of multimedia over those (now millions) of networked computers. It didn’t actually create the web, but it provided the underpinning principle of it.
In November, 1990, Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliao published a paper that described a web of hypertext marked up documents (https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html) that could be viewed in a browser and link to other documents. A month later Berners-Lee published the first actual website (http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html) . It looks pretty crude by today’s standards, but all subsequent developments are elaborations on what he created.
I got my first taste of the internet and its possibilities sometime in the mid-1980s when I signed up for the Prodigy network and then CompuServe. At the time the standard communication device was a 1200-baud modem that used telephone lines to access the boards. It was incredibly slow, with pages loading line by line over several minutes, but even at that it offered an entrance to a much broader world.
I discovered online databases where I could look up information that would otherwise require a trip to the library. I connected with other authors and publishing industry people from all around the world. I got my first personal email address through one of those services. I sold a book to one of the very first publishers selling ebooks, though the Kindle was still years away.
It’s been quite a journey watching those early bulleting board services morph into today’s worldwide web. Along the way it made possible video on demand, providing us with streaming movies and programs at our fingertips, e-reading devices which put whole libraries of books on a device the size of one very thin paperback, working remotely, sharing family photos on Facebook and Shutterfly, personalized maps available in seconds, video tours of houses you’re considering buying, access to music of every imaginable sort, all the apps we can’t live without on our smart phones, and, yes, even cat videos.
I met my first computer back in the early 1960s when IBM did a seminar for the children of employees. I believe it was their 750 model we worked on back then, a machine that would take up most of my current kitchen and was programmed with a block of punched cards. How strange it is to realize that my hand-held smart phone is a far more powerful computer than that room-sized monstrosity. We have come a long way.
Most of us the web without any real understanding of what it is or how it works. Thanks for shining a light on something that has become a big, but little understood, part of our lives. The computer system of the non-profit for which I volunteer was down yesterday and it was almost scary how little they could function without it.
ReplyDeleteFabulous! Remember chat rooms? People were horrified when they realized that people in chat rooms might not be who/how they actually described themselves. :)
ReplyDeleteHi Karen--
ReplyDeleteWhat a fascinating post! Great look back at how it all started. I was one of those early AOL users and I participated in one of those chat rooms where we talked about astronomy. I miss that chat.
Victoria--