It was one of these birthdays that went unnoticed by most of us - although the jubilee has been changing our lifes extremly over the past 15 years. And maybe it's just a joke of the history that the "modern" Web, the www, was born in Europe.
But however - it's just 15 years! Most of us can still remember times without the web. My own first step has been my first email adress back in 1995. Filetransfer in 1996. The first livechat for a radio show in 1997. Since 1999 is became part of my daily life and 2001 I moved in to stay.
It really changed communications. I realized it first when a close friend moved to Sweden - and email was the way to keep in touch. I loved email from the day I started because it is asynchron and far less disruptive than the phone. So I became a web adopt.
My kids are digital natives as are most younger people I know. Even for my oldest son - twelve years - there has been no time without the web and I have been on the web when he as born. His communication skills and habits are quite different to mine: He - as most kids - uses IM (Instant Messenging, mainly MSN or Skype in his case) far more often than email. Email is just to keep in touch with some old people and to receive the newsletter of his favorite football club. To his friends, cousins, parents - even in his case grandparents - he talks via IM. Of course the kids use your home wifi to keep in touch to the world and to each other.
Interesting enough my parents didn't like computers back in the early 80s and tried to keep me away from them. It was ok, because I loved to read real books (and still do). But they had no chance. In the early 90s I bought my first computer (an Olivetti notebook, like this antique one) and moved quickly into the web.
Thank you, CERN for opening up the web to public back in 1993. You changed my life and my communication.
What have been your first steps into this world? And when?
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Comments (4)
I tried Compuserve and in a second been away to the "real" web - learned html "programming" and started my first T-Shirt Shop on the web in 1995. 1996 I supported the "Save The Ampelmännchen" campaign what was a huge fun and got full media coverage in TV and print. From this moment on it became the (professional) reason of my live ;-) Thanks Cern!
Posted by KMTO | May 2, 2008 4:14 AM
Posted on May 2, 2008 04:14
I remember first using the web in college during the early to mid '90s. In 1997 I moved to rural Mexico to teach English at a private school. There was one computer for the whole facility, and teachers were allowed to sign up for one 30-minute session on the computer each week . Phone calls were extremely expensive, so using the school's slow and unreliable dial-up connection was the only way to keep in touch with friends and family.
I went back to visit my friends at the school a few years ago and was pleased to see that they had a fully modern computer lab with 20+ computers with high speed internet connections.
Clearly a lot has changed in a relatively short period of time.
Steve Bauer
Edelman Chicago
Posted by Steve Bauer | May 2, 2008 2:46 PM
Posted on May 2, 2008 14:46
Great post Wolfgang!
I was talking about the "where were you when you first discovered the web?" topic with a friend just the other day.
We were laughing about logging onto local Bulletin Board Services with 2400 baud modems in the late 80s - the ASCII text crawling up the screen very slowly.
I was working at an Apple Reseller while I was at school, and one of my colleagues there, Stuart Marburg, now the owner of the highly successful Australian ISP, Netspace, showed me Netscape Navigator on his Mac Quadra 840AV, and the weird and wonderful early websites from that time. We had gone from content via dialup, silo'd BBSs to content via a "web" of interlinked BBSs, with a really impressive visual interface. We were both instantly addicted.
Amazing times.
Con Frantzeskos
Edelman Australia
Posted by Con Frantzeskos | May 2, 2008 9:59 PM
Posted on May 2, 2008 21:59
From the beginning of 1997 I started to use Internet mostly by e-mail (I subscribed myself on every Internet marketing Website I found). From November 1997 I started the oldest e-mail magazine in Serbia (devoted to search and Internet promotion), and from October 1998 Internet started to be my profession...
Posted by Dragan Varagic | May 3, 2008 1:40 AM
Posted on May 3, 2008 01:40