Forum Moderators: phranque
Some on this board have been working on or around the net (in whatever guise it held at the time) for all or most of that, many for less. I'm nearly hitting the 10 year mark and the revolution that has taken place viz a vis technology, capability and users in even the last 5 or 6 years has been spectacular.
Thinking about the way it was when I started with Lynx, Archie and Gopher as the only real methods of browsing content on the web is funny now. The advent of Mosaic with it's tables and [gasp!] images to the advent of animated gifs, applets, flash, CSS.... (the list goes on) shows the accelerated pace at which the internet evolved in the latter half of the 90's.
It'll be interesting to see how the next 5, 10 and 20 years go. How much further will the browser evolution proceed? What new internet technologies wait for us around the corner? Time will tell! An exciting time at that.
but the Internet has been around since the 50's or 60's....
Hmm, I didn't realise it went back that far (I assume that that was pre-ARPAnet days?) - but I really meant more the Internet as we know it, the one that really came to be in '93 - the Tim Berners Lee vision of the Internet.
I was at a fascinating talk a couple of days on the Semantic Web. I'm getting a copy of the speakers slides and will post them here when they arrive for anyone who is interested.
Craig
The 20 year old thing comes in when they switched over to the IP protocol in '83 and opened it up for others to use. So, in a strict sense, 20 is right. Before '83 it wasn't called the Internet and it didn't work the same way.
In the true sense, though, it was "invented" 36 years ago by some guy not named Al.
G.
Since 1999 I have been earning 100% of my income from my websites.
Spend 70 hours a week on the net. Amazing that I only logged on for the first time about six years ago!
When did the rest of you get your first dose of the net?
A year later I graduated onto a FreeBSD machine and watched with awe at the advent of pictures and Mosaic...
Was that when Al Gore invented it? ;)
A couple of years ago I posted, on another board entirely, a rather sarcastic message expressing the same sentiments, and I got a reply pointing me to an article by Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, which said that Al Gore had played an important role in the Internet's development. I retired from the argument suitably chastened. (Sorry, but I've lost the reference).
If you want to know about the development of the Internet (and who the hell Vint Cerf is), the book to read is Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
Originally developed by Brit Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while working in Geneva for CERN, he went on in 1990 to create the first WWW server, the first web browser (called WorldWideWeb), the URL addressing system and the HTML language. He now leads the World Wide Web consortium (W3C).
Dazz
