The Web at 30

by Karen McCullough

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.

A Few Hours Without Cable and Internet – Arggh!

by Karen McCullough

A few days ago my cable television service went out and took the Internet service down with it. 

Fortunately it was only for a few hours, but those few hours seemed like forever.

When did I get so dependent on that cable linking me to the rest of the world?

I remember a time when television was delivered via the antenna on the roof of the house. Admittedly it could be finicky. Sometimes you got nothing but static. Choices were limited to a few stations. But it usually worked to some degree.

There was a time before the Internet as well. A time when I could work, read, and generally go about the day without having to check in on email constantly or rely on that connection to get things done.

That time is no more. Having it out for just a few hours was incredibly frustrating. Admittedly, I’m a web designer so I probably rely on that connection to do my job more than most people. Or maybe not. My daughter uses her home computer to log in and get work done when bad weather prevents her from getting to office. My son works from home. Others in the family do extensive research with it.

Things I realized I couldn’t easily do with the Internet down: update a couple of websites that needed some changes, pay bills, check the location of a shipping place, answer emails from family and friends, buy a book I wanted for my Kindle, look at the upcoming weather forecast, and check in for a flight I would be taking the next day.

All of those things can be done in other, less convenient, more time-consuming ways. But I’ve gotten used to doing all of them from the convenience of my office desk via the computer.

Just as we used to watch a limited array of television offerings with sometimes grainy pictures. I’ve now grown accustomed to being able to choose from a wide variety of programming options. Throw in my Netflix subscription and it’s almost unlimited. I get to watch pretty much any sporting event I want.

I’m soft and I’m spoiled.  I’ve gone all in for convenience and choice. The result is that I can be nearly paralyzed by an internet outage. Good trade-off? I don’t know. It’s just the way things are now.

Technology – Friend and Foe

 Since the development of the personal computer in the mid 1980s, I have been half in love and half at a loss about technology.

At the time, my employer was one of the first to embrace the computer as a word-processor that took over from the once brilliantly advanced golf-ball IBM typewriter as my favorite acquisition. Not long after learning how to use the 3.5” floppy disk for my workplace BBC (I was living in Cardiff at the time), we invested in a Sanyo dual 5.25” floppy disk PC on which my husband transcribed his doctoral thesis. My own set of floppy disks held chapters from some of my early manuscripts.

Shortly afterwards, my brother sent me 5.25” floppies with programs to load onto my hard drive – the only problem? My Sanyo ran programs in one floppy disk drive and saved to the second floppy disk drive, holding information somewhere in something called ‘memory’.  Within a few years, the technical world had leapt light years ahead and we were still in dot matrix mode.

Barely six years before, I had written my Masters Degree dissertation on a typewriter on cotton rag paper and a carbon copy, pecking one letter at a time to avoid any errors that meant re-typing the whole page because corrections were unacceptable. This collection became my first publication in hardcover. A few decades later my second hardcover book, a novel, had been written on a laptop and sent over the wireless network of the Internet from my home in Wales to my publisher New York.

The progress is ceaseless and I have recently confessed that I no longer use the myriad of notebooks I possess, preferring to take notes on my phone in a program that can be accessed from my tablet as well as my laptop and is held in that space somewhere called “cloud computing”. And strangely, my laptop has a solid-state (no moving parts) hard drive but no floppy disk drive nor a DVD/CD player. The programs (applications) I have added have come from “the cloud” – where ever that is – and I do not have them in any tangible form.

All of these developments make for equipment and activities that are beyond our comprehension and our control. What is convenient about my cloud note-keeping also makes me vulnerable to the failure of the entity where is it stored or the entity that has provided the program I use. If by some act of sabotage or Deus Machina, the bank of storage disks my provider uses is disabled, I will have lost all my work.

Yet, the lack of security is outclassed by the convenience. We innately trust progress, even though the original copy of my husband’s thesis is no longer accessible as the floppy disk has been superseded by the flash drive which has now been superseded by cloud-computing. In order to reproduce my dissertation, I would need to transcribe it from the printed copy.

There are always prices to pay for moving ahead. Change is embraced and resisted in equal measure. Making the most without losing the best is a balance we achieve by due diligence and thoughtful consideration. 

Embracing the future does not require that we must shun the past.

The Written Response

The Written Response
by Fran McNabb

I was going through an armoire the other day and ran across the box of letters I saved when my future husband was in Germany with the Air Force and I was still finishing my senior year in college. I took the letters out and savored the feel and the smell of them, then I sat down and revisited the words he wrote over forty-four years ago.

The written word has lost its dominance today and is being replaced rapidly by digital. Here I am this morning writing this blog on a computer and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I can’t help but think how sad it is that the written word is fading.

Digital is a much quicker type of writing, sometimes even requiring less thought and certainly less energy. Because I rely on my keyboard so much, I have lost the nice handwriting I once had. I’ve read that schools are steering away from teaching cursive. What a shame. I’ve always admired those people who have the ability to write beautiful cursive. I look back at history to the beautifully handwritten documents that our forefathers penned. No more do we have such papers. Everything is done on the computer.

There’s a lot to be said about the digital age we live in. Fast, convenient, neat—all of these qualities are positive, but let’s take a moment to look at the positives of the handwritten word.

First, letters and written cards contain a little bit of the writer. He or she must locate the paper or card to be sent and a pen to use. The writer must then sit and carefully write the message because there isn’t a delete button. After rereading to make sure no mistakes have been made, he must locate an envelope, the correct address, and a stamp. He then walks to the mailbox or drives to the post office. I know we’re not talking about a day’s work, but still, there is an effort that must be made on the part of the sender that isn’t required with digital messages.

These written communications are tangible and can be held and saved and read as often as the receiver wants for as long as the pieces are kept. I still get a little zing of excitement when I find a card or a personal letter in my mailbox.

Most of us have a love affair with digital communications. No way could some of us survive if our computers permanently crashed tomorrow—and that includes me. Computers have become a necessary part of our lives, emails have become our choice of communication, and social media has connected the world. I’m not saying that any of this is wrong. Our world has probably changed for the better because of computers and the internet, but I hope we don’t completely lose the value of written communications.

When was the last time you sat down and wrote to someone? I have a few friends and relatives who still take the time to write to me. I love them for that and I hope you too still have someone who’ll send you something personally written soon.

Fran McNabb grew up along the Gulf Coast and has used the waterways, the islands and the beaches in many of her novels. She and her husband still enjoy boating and fishing and love to share the experiences with their two sons and their families. When not on the water, Fran spends her time writing and painting. Visit her at www.FranMcNabb.com.