The Internet is 20 Years old

It is extraordinary to think that this simple site is where it all began – the World Wide Web is 20 years old and this was what is first looked like http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html


20 years ago today, on April 30 1993, CERN allowed open access to the technologies underpinning the World Wide Web. Although Tim Berners-Lee a worker at CERN had actually invented URL (website addresses) and hypertext protocols (clickable text that linked one document to another document) a few years before THIS was the day it all became public. It is interesting to think that CERN COULD have kept all this to themselves and we would not today be using Facebook Twitter and Amazon etc.

This news sent me back through time to the moments when – believe it or not I was an Internet Pioneer! I read about this new invention the  World Wide Web when I was messing about on my computer connecting to bulletin boards in search of DOOM and other such games. I thought WOW THIS is the future, I actually had set up my very first website with Tolkien related, roleplaying and wargames material on it within within a few months of learning about this and my – long since defunct Demon Internet site – was one of the first few hundred in the world.

It is strange to think back to those early days when most people I knew did not even own a computer and friends would come and stay for a night just to play on mine. Certainly there were no tablets or mobile phones with any internet ability at all. As a result those of us active on the net used to find ourselves in very weird cyber locations and I used to get most visits from US military sites and lots of Finnish people. Early adopters the Fins maybe because there aint much to do in the winter! I wish my site still existed as there was some cool roleplaying adventure stuff that date back to university days on it.

Many people have since learnt a lot more about building internet sites than i will ever know or understand but back then i was briefly almost an expert. Indeed it is a bit like comparing today the complexity of  a modern car with the early days of cars when a man could understand his car engine and rebuild it. Indeed he had to because often garages were few and far between. In those early days there were NO PC worlds. NO high street shops which sold PCs. You had to build your own PC, understand and code many of the tiles needed to run it (Remember DOS, Autoexec.bat. Config.sys Expanded and Extended memory?). Indeed my first PC had 40MB of Hard drive space and 4MB of Ram. We sure have come a long way in 20 years.

So its an odd reminder today of when I was 25 and charting the new exciting world of the World Wide Web.