Prescience Is A Pain
The first "web page" was created in Switzerland, way back in 1992. It was crude, had no color, no background, no graphics and it was a technical achievement in a technical world. It was actually considered to be a "non-event" at the time. Of interest only to the academics.
The structure and content remained kludgy and suitable only for text for almost two years. Howsomever, in 1994, something happened that changed all that. That something was Mozilla. Created by some college kid named Andreeson, it brought the rudimentary elements of style, content and pizzazz to the dry and technical standards of hyper text markup language and the hyper text transfer protocol. Thus was truly born the World-Wide Web. Who’d a thunk it?
Well…me, for one. In July of 1994, I got my first peek at the Web. Saw my first real web page. It was on someone elses’s machine at work, in the boonies of Nebraska. It was ugly, but it was readable, informative and it beat the hell out of the newsgroups all us techies had been putzin’ around with up till then. It was slow to load, had no graphics, was the most God-awful shade of gray you’ve ever seen … and it mesmerized me!
Right then I knew I had to know more. I loaded up Mozilla 0.9beta, a TCP/IP stack and a winsock onto one diskette. It all came to less than 800K. I took it home, installed it on my AST DX4-100 blazingly fast home PC, called up my provider, which was the modem at work, and I CRUISED the Web! I was truckin’ at 14.4 KBPS. I had over 2,000 web sites to choose from, even in those early days. Most all were at institutes of higher learning, but there were a few vanity sites. Even then, you could find dirty pictures. Of course, searching was a lot easier, as was writing web pages. Notepad was all you needed … hell, it was all you could GET … and the graphics were soooo simple. Everyone was dazzled that there were graphics at all, never mind the quality that passed for state-of-the-art back then.
Fast forward about four years and look where we are now. Dynamic HTML, VRML, sound, video, push technology, image maps, databases tied to web pages, over a thousand search engines … and millions of web sites. Four years ago I said, "This is how instantaneous, world-wide, person-to-person communication is going to become a reality." That was me said that … truly! Long before ICQ. Way before NetMeeting or Powwow, and certainly before Internet telephony.
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