The World Wide Web
January 7, 2006
Do you remember the first time you saw the World Wide Web through a browser? I do. I am a little hazy on the date, but it was thanks to my friend Bill Stewart, who was then an Associate Dean at Boston University’s College of Engineering. He had helped one of the professors set up a lab, and invited me by at lunch one day. He sat me in front of a browser and showed me a few sites. It seems to me the University of Hawaii was one of the sites, along with a couple of other academic and scientific ones.
I was tickled, and knew I was looking at a Great New Thing. The Internet was not new to me. I had worked at Mitre in the early 1980s, and we had Usenet and email access as early as I can remember. But the Web, of course, was graphical. Here were photographs and variable fonts, colors and backgrounds. I was looking at recent pictures from geological experiments thousands of miles away and reading things that had posted in the last few days, hours, and minutes. Attractive, low-cost publishing that reaches users around the world, instantaneously.
Sometimes I still marvel at this basic truth about the World Wide Web—this instantaneous reach around the globe. Reading my site activity logs for the last week, I see that I have had visitors from almost 50 different countries. The geographical span starts out as you might expect—the United States far ahead of any other country, and then a few hundred visitors from the UK. There are a few dozen each from Germany, Candada, the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, and the Czech Republic. And then there is a long tail, and that is the piece that fascinates me—Iceland, Russia, Latvia, Morocco, Samoa, Singapore, Pakistan, and Iran. A warm hello to all of you out there.
Posted by Bill Trippe at January 7, 2006 2:03 PM
