So here I go again, this time I’m going to take this blog thing a little more serious. I’ve decided that I’m not going to worry about who sees this, what they think etc, honestly I can’t imagine anything I will say here will be useful to most individuals but my goals are to provide a place for me to muse, to give out thoughts and opinions and maybe even provide some useful content. Blogging to me is like a soapbox, everyone seems to have one nowadays, they love to get on their little soapboxes and rant and rave and complain about the world, be it politics, the fact that Walmart sucks, the war in the middle east, or that the person down the street from them plays their music too loud at night, its a place to air grievances and blow off a little steam.
It seems the Internet nowadays is so very very different to when I first visited 14 years ago. I was just starting college and got my email account and wanted to do all those cool things like email friends etc, now at this point in time the web was very much in its infancy, no fancy browsers, no Ajax or JavaScript and certainly no tabbed browsing. You had a choice of gopher or lynx I believe, then of course Mosaic came about and changed everything, but that’s a different story. I remember when you could surf the web in a day, when search engines didn’t exist, or when search engines were so simple that well, you get the idea.
The web is a very different animal nowadays, so very interactive and very rich in content and ideas. I’ve seen it grow up, become a necessity in peoples lives, I personally cannot begin to imagine what I would do if I couldn’t just lookup something I didn’t know by typing in a search in Google. Before then I guess we had libraries and encyclopedia’s, now we have Google and Wikipedia.
So what am I getting at, nothing, I’m not trying to make a point, or blow of steam, its an observation. As I’ve grown up on the web, I’ve observed what’s been going on around me, I’d like to say I’ve been a part of it, but really I’ve not had that much influence, I wish I had, and I could have, but that’s just the way the web is, its growing so fast and quickly. It seems to me that when it comes to the Internet, the generation gap is much smaller in years, but larger in terms of change. I’m figuring 10 years probably the gap as it stands now, but that gap is huge. In 10 years the world has changed, and the Internet has along with it, its become prolific in every aspect of our lives and will do so more so in the next 10 years, we carry the Internet around in our pockets, we have access to it 24/7/365. It won’t be long that it will be part of who we are, of course privacy advocates will scream and complain, but that’s progress, if progress doesn’t happen we might as well not got out of the trees and started making sharp sticks and making fire.
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I’m with you. It’s weird to look back on what the internet was and now is. I remember using gopher and finger to get around the Internets. I remember how cool it was to get a browser with color support. You still had to use ‘helper apps’ to handle any type of file. Once inline image support was out there was no putting the web back into the box.
I remember having to setup all the helper apps to make sure you could view content. What ever happened to things like VRML, wasn’t that going to be the next big thing for the web, guess not.
Yeah. I had a short span of time when I was doing some VRML development. Then Macromedia was going to take over the 3D web by adding 3D to it’s Shockwave plugin. Only Flash took over the multimedia web space and Director pretty much fell off the map.