Happy 25th Birthday, WWW!

Happy birthday to the World Wide Web! According to news reports, the “WWW” turned 25 years old this week.

My gateway to the internet was BBSes, which slowly began carrying Usenet newsgroups and offering internet e-mail addresses in the early 90s. I first got direct access to the internet in 1994, thanks to a co-worker who loaned me his college account. It was a Linux shell account, which meant text only — no graphics at all. With unlimited access to that account I used IRC to chat with people all around the world, FTP to download files, and Gopher, which was kind of like a text-based version of web sites. There were no global search engines back then so I bought an “internet phonebook” full of Gopher and FTP sites and spent months flipping through the pages and connecting to interesting things. My first six months of internet access looked a lot like this:

That was my introduction to the internet. It was command-line only, fast, and amazing. It wasn’t until the spring of 1995 that I first saw the “World Wide Web.” Like I said, up until that point my experience with the internet had been completely text based. My friend Justin showed me my first website, a horribly designed Star Wars tribute page that included animated lightsabers and a MIDI version of the Star Wars theme. It was the most awesome thing I had ever seen and heard.

“This internet thing is going to catch on, I tell you!”

While I wasn’t there for every minute of the World Wide Web’s life, I’ve been there for 4/5 of it. I remember spending hours (if not days) looking up random topics on AltaVista and Yahoo Search using Netscape Navigator and thinking things just couldn’t get any better than that. To this day I remember the first URL I saw in public. It was a billboard for Wrigley’s chewing gum that had “www.wrigley.com” written in the corner. Funny how back then I couldn’t imagine an established company putting up a website and today I can’t imagine an established company not having one.

It feels odd to be writing a “get off my lawn” speech this soon, but if you weren’t there at the beginning, you missed out. The days of hacking together websites using notepad, the days of dial-up internet access, the days of getting disconnected from your ISP every couple of hours because you were tying up their phone lines… some of those memories seem like a million lifetimes ago. I’m guessing a majority of the millions of people today who access the internet today on their phones don’t remember the days of getting busy signals when trying to dial up to the internet. Back then connecting to the internet was a process, a ritual — something you had to consciously do. Today it’s the opposite. I have to be conscious about disconnecting from it occasionally.

I could rattle off a thousand ways the internet has changed my life. I’ve had conversations with thousands of people and met hundreds of them, people I never would have met if it weren’t for the internet. I’ve laughed and cried, created and destroyed, and made friends and enemies, all from behind this keyboard. Most of all though, I’ve shared my life experiences with other people and they’ve shared theirs with me. I’ve met close friends through the internet. To say the web has been a game changer for me is an understatement. It’s been a life changer.

So, happy 25th birthday, World Wide Web. I can’t wait to see what you look like on your 50th.