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… (read more)