So I'm waiting for Stathis to get his lazy ass to the station, and seeing as I was a little bit early I went into the nearest store to check the latest magazines. While I'm in there I noticed the latest Wired issue. Now bear in mind I've never bought Wired in my life. It had a little title about blogging in the army which caught my eye, which was the reason I picked it up in the first place.
For some strange reason I didn't actually notice the god damn cover itself. I wasn't really interested in the rest of it. Except I really should have been. The cover story is about the Internet turning 10 years old. Yup Netscape IPO went live on the 9th of August 1995.
I didn't realise this until I wrote this post that it seems you can read all the Wired articles online! So if you want to read what I'm talking about, the article is found here.
The article is written by Kevin Kelly, and in my mind is the article of the year; or at least the article I've enjoyed the most this year. It's pretty lengthy, with the start telling you about the birth of the Internet and where everyone was predicting it would go. What makes the article shine is where Kevin starts to extrapolate as to where the Internet could potentially be in 10 years time from now.
Think about it, would you have been able to predict 10 years ago, Gmail, Google Maps, Ebay, Paypal, Amazon, Blogging, Open Source, Online Communities, P2P File sharing, Wikipedia? Kevin tries to do that, even though he claims he's got absolutely no chance, I think he makes a gallant effort, and written a great article that made me smile for a long while after I read it.
Obviously it got me thinking when I actually started using the internet, and I'd probably say it was around September 1997. 2 years after the fact. Not sure when net access hit Greece, but I'm pretty certain it was during my 'I'm not going to touch computers phase'. In 1997 my frequent areas were the Wildstorm forums, and yahoo. Times change.
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Dotcom Déjà Vu - 10 reasons why the bubble is back
It has been ten years since Netscape skyrocketed on their first day of trading, starting what was arguably the biggest stock market binge in history. I cannot shake the feeling that those days of overexcitement, lousy valuation analysis and moronic gre...
That the internet is turning ten makes me feel old.
I was running a BBS on a 2400 bps then a 14400 bps modem when I was 13-15 so about 14 years ago. That was when "design" was ANSI (a big upgrade from black and white ASCII), Frontdoor delivered cross BBS mail, door games were popular, file transfers took forever (even though most files were small), and I was a super big nerd well on my way to making millions in IT.
Then I got my first girlfriend and the modem was turn off for the first time in over two years. I blame her for everything. :)
Things have really changed.
Seriously I was actually online in 1995 with Verizon webspace. Then not too much after that I was set up at the accursed Geocities.
My, my how time does fly.
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