My Internet Journey
Well its been over a year since I last posted - not that anyone was viewing (except the spambots!) and recently I've been reflecting upon my journey through the various stages of the internet.
I've always been interested in computers, ever since we got a commodore vic 20 way back in the 80's. Being a typical geek I loved to work out what was happening under the hood - both hardware and software.
Over the years things progressed in the world of the personal computer at an amazing pace and so to the 90's and an Olivetti computer sitting in our dining room, a monster of a machine. It was a Pentium (nothing fancy like MMX) running Windows 95 - a major upgrade from the 286/Win 3.1 machine it replaced.
Then came the internet, I say internet, I mean AOL. Dial up modem and a monthly price plan for a certain number of minutes. Joanna Lumley would announce the immortal "Welcome to AOL, You have EMail" and so to my first experience of the internet.
Geocities web pages that took an age to load with <blink> tags, animated GIFs and progressive JPEG's that took an eternity to load - even longer if somebody in the house picked up the phone or you had call waiting! I remember finding it amazing that I could have instant text chat with somebody on the other side of the globe.
The World Wide Web was a strange place back then, good quality content was sparse and the best bits really belonged to companies like AOL or Compuserve. Creating content in a form that could be read by others was a small feat - you had to learn HTML and even then it was a different matter to make it look good.
Fast-forward to the early naughties (after the dot-com boom and crash) and broadband means much faster access to the content - which had increased in volume but not really in style. That's when things began to change, people wanted more and more and the tools existed for everyone to be able to take their content to the world.
Forward again to the present day - social networking has hit the masses. Celebrities communicating directly with their fans and a world where it is practically impossible to hide on-line. Now the internet is about user generated content, video on demand and always connected mobile devices. Life is changing and I doubt anybody can say where we will be in ten years time.