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Twenty Five years ago today, the world changed forever…

· Science & Technology

And no one realised what a revolutionary change the web would be.

But now we know exactly what revolutionary change looks like!

August 6th, 2016 |

13 comments to Twenty Five years ago today, the world changed forever…

  • John Galt III
    August 7, 2016 at 1:10 am

    In the US it has made so many changes – here are a few and a book suggestion:

    1) Retail stores oversupplied
    2) it has lowered prices as it has made price discovery open and easy – see No.1
    3) It has ended the newspaper and TV news duopoly.
    4) It has angered the elites and totalitarian countries – they are fighting back.
    5) As government schools as well as colleges and universities become areas of total speech and thought control, the internet is a great alternative to their propaganda and bullshit.
    6) Looking forward, we see Facebook and Twitter bending to the totalitarians and speech controllers. That should allow for a terrific business opportunity and eventually Marc Zuckerburg’s fortune will diminish as well as Facebook’s popularity and Obama’s ass will stop being licked 24/7 by amazing Marc.
    7) Wacky leftist stooge Al Gore, before he helped begin the Global Warming Hoax, said he invented the internet with no pushback from the MSM, but he was instantly exposed on, guess what, the internet and laughter continues concerning America’s fat, pompous jackass.

    As the internet’s beginnings began under President Eisenhower when Al Gore had just got out of diapers (nappies for you Brits) we know he was lying again. I suggest this book – it is short and terrific book on the internet’s origins and what a surprise, Al Gore’s name is nowhere to be seen:

    Review

    https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/03/specials/hafner-wizard.html

    If you want to buy:

    http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/where-wizards-stay-up-late-katie-hafner/1111638302

  • john malpas
    August 7, 2016 at 1:48 am

    You left out that the populace is increasingly shackled to ramshackle machine that needs constant maintainence and ‘updating, is preyed upon by ever increasing criminals and is subject to the whim of big business eg Windows, Google etc.
    That is – ‘the computer’.
    The new opiate of both business and the person.
    It has refined witch hunts and mob rule.
    It has created new priesthoods to tend this god.
    The young are seduced and the old confused.
    Progress

  • Laird
    August 7, 2016 at 2:10 am

    “The young are seduced and the old confused.”

    That about sums it up. But ’twas ever thus. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  • bobby b
    August 7, 2016 at 3:41 am

    “The young are seduced and the old confused.”

    True “progress” when it comes will reverse these roles.

    Everything before that happens will be noise.

  • Paul Marks
    August 7, 2016 at 8:12 am

    You mean it was not invented by Al Gore?

  • Shirley Knott
    August 7, 2016 at 11:42 am

    ‘Exactly’?
    I think not. We certainly know far more today than we did 25 years ago, but ‘exactly’? No more than we know exactly what the personal computer revolution looks like, leads to, or provides.
    No more than *we* know exactly how to produce a pencil.

    (Apparently I’m feeling curmudgeonly and pedantic this morning. Sorry. I started my career in personal computers 30 years ago and I still marvel at what we are up to.)

  • Bod
    August 7, 2016 at 3:15 pm

    Shirley you’d learn how to produce 1 (I) pencil on you_tube?

  • nemesis
    August 7, 2016 at 6:12 pm

    Well, I am old and confused. If you google ‘Internet 25yrs’ different dates come up, main anniversary dates seem to be around March 2014 and Dec 2015.

  • Perry de Havilland (London)
    August 7, 2016 at 7:52 pm

    nemesis, the anniversary is for first web page rather than “internet”

  • Sam Duncan
    August 7, 2016 at 8:11 pm

    Nemesis, that w3c article takes its cue from a Usenet post by Berners-Lee in August 1991 summarising the already existing Web. After that, people outside CERN started accessing it and, in modern parlance, “it became a thing”. It’s a bit like dating the start of the commercial internet from the registration of symbolics.com in 1985, rather than Arpanet in the late ’60s or the TCP/IP suite in the early ’80s. It existed before then in a slightly different form, but for most of the world, that’s when it really began. And to be honest, the WWW equivalent of that moment is, more realistically, April 1993, when CERN announced that the protocol could be used royalty-free. That’s when things properly started to take off.

    But I’ve always taken the Web’s “real” birthday to be Christmas Day 1990, when TB-L fired up the first server on that famous NeXTcube. (Doesn’t it look old and beaten-up now? I remember when those things were unattainable objects of lust and envy.)

    I still prefer Gopher.

  • nemesis
    August 7, 2016 at 10:07 pm

    Thanks, think I get it now. You are talking to someone whose mobile phone is made of Bakelite!!

  • Alisa
    August 8, 2016 at 10:14 am

    nemesis, the anniversary is for first web page rather than “internet”

    Thanks Perry – that was not clear from the post…

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