Happy 30th Birthday to the World Wide Web

The Google Doodle for the day celebrates the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Wow. Just ... WOW! It's so difficult to think of a world that isn't instantly connected. A world where we can't be good friends with people across the country, or even across oceans from their home to yours, and interact easily on a daily basis. A world where knowledge is at the tip of our fingers. Want to know something? Google it. Google has become both an action verb and a noun, a part of the English language and maybe the world language. WOW, pretty impressive for what is actually the name of a company. 

Today's Google Doodle celebrates 30 years of the
World Wide Web. It's hard to remember a world
without the Web at our fingertips. 

I stepped onto this strange and wonderful road in 1996 with my first laptop (a B/W text-driven laptop that I might still have hanging around in storage). I had a dial-up connection and still remember that distinctive purr and tone I would hear as it dialed through and connected. On the other side of that phone cable were people who shared common ground with me, many of whom I'm still in touch with today, 23 years later. 

I remember the old dial-up modem set-up and the delays. They
were a part of my mornings. I would go on-line for an hour
every morning, then disconnect and start my workday. 

I had been on-line sporadically as much as five years earlier than 1996 with an even slower modem, a more code-driven context, and what was called a "Bulletin Board" community way back then. I remember being a bit miffed when I discovered that an ex-employee had stolen my 9600 baud modem in the mid-1990's. But it was so soon supplanted by faster versions, his triumph was quite temporary. 

These days cellphones are ubiquitous for people of all ages, including
children. Is this good? Is this bad? I really can't say. It's different than
the options I had as a kid, but that doesn't make it bad. 

Why write about the World Wide Web? Because I'm on that web every day. I have a cell-phone that's attached to it, I have multiple computers that are attached to it, I run networks on it, I receive orders on it, and I publish on it. The WWW is my playground, and it's hard to remember that it hasn't been there for my entire life. 

The phone of my youth was the rotary dial phone, sometimes
as a stand-alone, sometimes as a party line. If there was
a second (or third) phone in the house, it still worked
off the same phone line. Only one person could be
on a call at a time. 

I'm old, though. I look at the inventions of my lifetime and am amazed by how far we've come in worldwide communications. TV's are no longer black and white with small screens. Telephones are no longer stationary and relying on attached cords and heavy headsets. The WWW itself is no longer reliant on phone cords, and can be carried in my back pocket on a phone that would have fit easily into the Science Fiction plots of the early 1960's. I've seen a lot of innovation and I look forward to my next twenty years. Why not? The world is out there and I have a phone and the World Wide Web. 

Happy 30th birthday to the World Wide Web. When I was growing up
in the 60's and early 70's, the saying was "Never trust anyone over 30:.
So here's the question - are we supposed to stop trusting the WWW?
Have we ever truly trusted it anyway? 

Have a great Tuesday. I'll return tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'd better get today's Bingo story written and up for all to read.