August 2009 is my 15 year web anniversary. I don’t remember the exact date when I symlinked to someone else’s copy of Netscape running on a Sparc 4 at the University of Tennessee’s computer science lab. I do very clearly recall making that link, so when I first ran Netscape, I must have been suitably impressed! Up until then, NCSA Mosaic browser had seemed perfectly adequate… after that point, using Mosaic was painful. Fortunately, the CS sysadmins installed Netscape on the system very soon afterwards. This was also a significant event… the CS sysadmin team (SG, TG, CJ, etc. you know who you are), while technically superb, had a bit of a reputation for crankiness! So getting any new executable on the system was some cause for celebration.
The WWW: Dinosaur days
The early web was full of people, and full of very interesting links. Just about every link went “somewhere.” And around each link, there was a person really close by. Mostly students, professors or scientists of various stripes to be sure, but still, the intellectual content was really high… which counts as entertainment and distraction in those circles. People, people everywhere. Imagine a web without companies!
That was before pr0n…
Fast forward 15 years
Everything really kicked off fast after Netscape implemented jpeg and gif image display capability. ECommerce was suddenly viable: the internet finally delivered something (porn) people were willing to spend money purchasing! This resulted in much more rapid development of “ecommerce” in general, past it’s humble start with Perl scripts using CGI. Now there’s hundreds of ecommerce platforms for the web, using a wide variety of platforms.
But the most fundamental change in 15 years seems (to me) to be a shift from “What can I contribute?” to “What’s in it for me?” Then, we used the web for sharing information, for publishing research, for adding to knowledge at large. Now, the focus of the web seems to be personal or corporate enrichment, as fast as possible thank-you-very-much. Granted, both of these have a large element of self-promotion, but the difference in spirit is noticeable to me.
There’s nothing really wrong with this… but the differences are profound. For example, here’s the difference in linking strategies, then versus now:
- Then: link to interesting material to educate and entertain readers, provide long term usefulness for yourself as much as others.
- Now: examine each site very carefully for the site’s strategic value to enhance your own site.
To be fair, really bad websites now vastly outnumber useful websites, so being picky about what you link to is important. Here’s another reason: bad links can detract from the value of your site. There’s nothing I could add to Anna Williams article over at Building From Nothing: Do You Know Who You’re Linking to? (Read it!)
What about you?
How long have you been on the web? Did you start as I did creating your own simple web pages by hand? Or were you more of a spectator? What about now: are you a “content creator,” or is your interest more along the personal entertainment and information lines? How do you see yourself using the web in the future? Reminisce! Prognosticate! Comments are open for business…
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I came very late. I was busy offline. But I remember clearly the first time I heard about the Internet although not in those words. It was in Munich in 1992. A computer geek I knew had one of those old computers with the blue screen and text … and he told me that he was communicating with people all over the world through his computer. WOW! I was really impressed.
Then, as I said, I got busy for a few years. In 2003, I discovered email …
I was a bit slow on the draw I suppose.
But now, I love blogging. And I love sharing ideas, education, art, information, and news with people. I think that this what makes the Internet so valuable to us as a civilization – the speed of communication which has been made possibly, and the speed with which ideas can be spread and knowledge can be shared. That hasn’t died, I suppose one just as a bit more to wade through now than in the past.
I don’t spend as much time on actually blogging as I would like to but I am actually in the process of reorganizing so that I can. This is something very close to my heart and who I am. It “fits” for me.
1992.
You could still email using uunet/uucp (unix to unix copy) back then: !path!to!recipient IIRC. Kooky.
I managed to find Usenet about that time, and I’ve been online pretty much since then. Never had any intention of using the net for anything more than information exchange though.