The internet is 40
The grand thing that we all take for granted now, the internet, is 40 years old this year. To celebrate, the Guardian Technology has been running a series called Internet at 40. As part of this series they have just published a rather nice interactive People’s history of the internet made up of user contributions and the Guardian’s own research and interviews. It’s really interesting. There was a lot of life before the web (20 years worth in fact) but perhaps the most fun bit is to look at the development of that particular part of the internet since 1989….Hamster Dance anyone?
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I also saw that People’s History of the Internet & thought it was cool. What is particularly weird is thinking of it *as* history (which it is) yet being able to relate your own life to it so closely. We all know the fall of the Berlin Wall was momentous but not many of us were actually there. But I can still remember my absolutely incredulity when, in my second year of undergraduate, a friend told me about this new ‘Hotmail’ thing that let you send messages across the entire world, for free. ‘For free?’ I scoffed, & wouldn’t believe him until he showed me his Hotmail account. And now in what seems like the blink of an eye later, email is at the heart of how we work, particularly in the academy. Now I’m just sounding like one of those maudlin gee-aren’t-the-interwebs-amazing old person posts so I’ll stop (though I am glad people who actually know what you’re talking about tech-wise such as yourselves liked that Guardian article too).
Well, if we’re going to swap sad stories, my epiphany was a thing called ftp (file transfer protocol)…what, you mean I can ferret around in a filestore that’s actually on the west coast of the USA?? Wow!