I was a bit surprised to see buried deep in the constant stream of noise that the Internet turned thirty today.
By now you know (unless you have been living in a hole or at Mar Largo) that a really smart (no doubt left-leaning) scientist at CERN (home of the smartest fucking people in the universe) developed it as a means for other brilliant people to easily communicate their scientific findings with each other so they could be – for example – verified for accuracy. What a concept in this day and age, huh? π€£
I had embraced the digital era with gusto buying my first PC and modem in 1990. Initially, I used applications like Lotus 123 to fulfill my OCD and categorize stuff like my photo slides. Later, CompuServe came along with personal email and newsgroups. I did some early e-commerce buying and selling underwater camera equipment.
Sometime around late 1994, we got our first access to the internet from work. I recall vividly seeing live webcam footage of the Oklahoma City bombing in April of 1995. Soon we were able to dial up with our work computers to a special number and connect to the internet using a protocol called ‘Slip’. I remember you had to hit the escape key at exactly the right time to get the connection!
In 1996 I left Hewlett-Packard and moved to Atlanta to do a startup. We dug into the internet quickly and I started to learn more and more about it. I literally spent the first year in my tiny one-bedroom apartment either working (12 hours a day) or exploring the internet. It became an integral part of my professional life to both do my job as well as develop products that started to make use of it. Alas, we were ahead of our time it seemed and when the bubble burst around the Millenium it was all over!
At work I was using Microsoft FrontPage to publish a portal for business partners we worked with. As reported elsewhere, I secured my own domain – tubridy.net – in 1998. I started playing around with my own website and had a full-time presence established quickly. FrontPage turned out to be a dead end so I eventually learned all the WWW gobbledegook! HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and so on. I could now build a site the way that Tim did!
It all came full circle in the late 2000s when I re-invented myself as a User Experience Designer. This was a profession that did not even exist (at least in its present form) when I first started my career in the early 1980s – a mere 30 years earlier. I went on to manage the design and content for IBM’s software business partner’s ‘portal’ until I retired in 2018!
The rest, so they say, is history. I have to say without a doubt that the Internet is the most remarkable invention of my lifetime. Even with all the super-exciting science that has taken place since mankind split the atom in the 1940s has anything so fundamentally changed our world? It’s interesting that it’s a lot less about technology and more about man’s ever-consuming passion to learn more about the world.
