I was pulled in several directions when trying to home in on what to write about this week. More gun violence. An uptick in fentanyl overdoses. (Both topics I’ll explore in this space later.) But what caught my attention while researching was that my attention was all over the place. My brain was abuzz with information overload between the many tabs and my phone’s notifications.
As I clicked and scrolled, I stumbled upon an NPR story: “30 years ago, one decision altered the course of our connected world.” April 30 was the 30th anniversary of the launch of the World Wide Web into the public domain — and it altered its course.
Thirty years ago, I was a carefree adolescent. Sometimes I’d play Paperboy on Nintendo until my thumbs blistered or watch hours of rock-and-roll videos on MTV. But most of my free time I’d spend outside — meandering the neighbourhood scanning the streets for loose change or catching bees in Coke bottles or some other random activity that would be considered rather dull by a kid today. I got my first pager in high school — a useless thing. The little electronic box would buzz, a number would appear on the tiny rectangular screen, and then I’d have to find a landline to call said number. I didn’t get my first cell phone or home computer until college, which was great. I could look up essay resources, or travel maps online. If my car broke down, I could call someone right then to help rather than walk to the nearest pay phone. (And people still met up in person, looked at each other and engaged uninterrupted! That was nice.) But it’s been a slippery slope from there.
Trends and Predictions for the Next 30 Years
In the NPR story, the author recalled how, 30 years ago, Morning Edition listeners heard from host Neal Conan: “Imagine being able to communicate at will with 10 million people all over the world. Imagine having straight access to classify hundreds of libraries as skilfully as the most up-to-date news, business, and weather reports. Imagine being clever to get medical or gardening advice from experts instantly. This is not a dream, and it’s the Internet.”
The World Wide Web opened a portal to uncharted territory, complete information, and instant communication. With digital technology at our fingertips at every moment, we can do all that was imagined and more. But it’s more like a fever dream today, full of strange reels, live streams, and windows into weirder worlds than we could have ever conceived. Now we have “influencers,” TikTok trends, online gaming, and the metaverse (and, and, and) to take up the time of bored teens and, well, all of us worldwide if we let them.
Is that a dial-up modem encircled in your ears, or are you just staring at today’s Google Doodle? Its strength is both because March 12 marks a particular bit in the Internet report: the birthday of the World Wide Web.
How It Is Shaping the Future of Technology.
The sequence of behind we know and love as the Web is now 30 years old. The www you glimpse in your browser’s address bar when you enter a URL, a.k.a. the Web, a.k.a. what assists retain you hitch to your screens, is hardly a millennial; actually, the Web is 18 years youthful than email and two years younger than the GIF.
What is the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet? Rethinking your capacity to explain what the Web is? Strap in because the reply is fun and cause, and there’s no time like a birthday to time-travel through internet history.
However, the Internet comes to us not from a computer company but directly from the United States Cold War military strategy. In the 1960s, American intelligence officials sought ways to diversify their detail caches so that information would be more accessible to share among effective and that if foreign agents ran to destroy one store, they wouldn’t be killing all of the military’s intel. The military firm ARPA, short for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, pioneered computer innovation at the time.
A Brief History and Reflection
Enter two youthful MIT grad students named Leonard Kleinrock and Larry Roberts. In 1961, Kleinrock grew his thesis around the idea that computers could chat with each other if they could carve up their detail into tiny, easily transferrable packets. In 1966, Roberts clutched this idea to ARPA and used it to build the ARPANET. A US Defense predicted it was the first computer network employed and detailed the modern Internet’s basis. A few years behind, two more ARPANET architects, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, created the current internet protocols for information divide between computers that are still used today.
In a nutshell, the Internet still races on Kleinrock’s basic idea — the dissemination of information split into small amounts for easy transmission. But these days, it’s a little more detailed: It connects our phones and laptops to servers full of facts and satisfies our screens when we type in website addresses. It does this along the World Wide Web. And we have tech myth Tim Berners-Lee to thank for it.
