Big Anniversary Coming Up

A short blurb from a piece at CNET News...

The first public demo of the Web in the United States in 1991.

(Credit: CERN)

"It was quite a warm December evening in San Antonio," recalled Professor Wendy Hall of the UK's University of Southampton, who was in that room for the 1991 Hypertext Conference where Berners-Lee had been denied a speaking spot to show off the most important human creation of a generation or three. "In the courtyard outside the demo room was a tequila fountain and everybody was outside drinking free margaritas, so nobody was inside. This was the first demo of the World Wide Web in America."

Keep in mind, this wasn't a conference of Luddites. It was a gathering of people interested in hypertext before anyone really knew the phrase (most people still don't know it, because it was quickly supplanted in our culture by "the Web"). This was a crowd of information nerds, and yet, they still were unimpressed by the World Wide Web on day one. And it wasn't really even day one, either. Berners-Lee had actually first submitted a paper detailing his invention almost three years earlier, on March 12, 1989.

And this is the date I mean to commemorate over the course of the next week -- the actual birth date of the World Wide Web, a creation Mr. Berners-Lee and his colleagues gave to the world completely free of charge on that day 25 years ago. In this post and three that follow, I'll look at the first two and a half decades of the Web, from its awkward infancy, to those crazy boom and bust years, the lull that followed (I like to call them the "lost in the wilderness years"), and finally, the countless bits and pings of the lovable monstrosity that is today's mobile and social Web.

This is compelling stuff, written by a guy who came of age at the same time as these inter-tubes.  The piece rang more than a few bells for me, even though I was a middle-aged retired Air Force sergeant working in his second career when the 'net came into this world.  I was also a very lucky former sergeant... given as how I was in the technology bid'niz, a fortuitous accidental career choice that changed everything for me, and I do mean every-freaking-thing.  I suppose what I'm trying to say is I had the opportunity to watch these inter-tubes grow from the inside.  Watching the emergence of the internet and assisting in its growth was heady stuff in the way-back... even for a bit player like myself... and the web remains fascinating now, even if I'm just another end-user.  That said, the web changed everything for everybody and continues to do so, on a daily basis.  Reading the history of its origins and development should interest everyone, with no exceptions. 

I'll be looking forward to the next three articles in this series.