Evidently, someone at CNN missed a deadline, in a major way. This morning, this retrospective celebrating 10 years of the World Wide Web was front page news on their site. Problem, is, they cite the “birth” of the web as happening in 1994.
Aside from the math problems, I generally have a bone to pick with them about their overglorifying the whole thing:
In 1994, people had to call the bank to check their balances. Or inquire in person, or wait for a paper statement to arrive in the mail. Baseball box scores were found in the newspaper. Weather forecasts came over the phone from the weather bureau, or on TV.
Back then, most Americans still had to lick a stamp to send mail.
Then along came the Internet, and an experimental browser called Mosaic, followed by an improved browser from Netscape. And if you had a computer, you discovered a new way to this cool, new thing called the World Wide Web. Mosaic and Netscape were the first popular connection to what came to be called the information superhighway.
Okay, of course we have the obvious glaring omissions. The internet didn’t just spontaneously appear in ’94, as if by some miracle of AOL. It existed long before that, in the halcyon days when the general public wasn’t very interested in computers. The good thing about this is that there were no banner ads, no spam, and trolls were few and far between on what was then the ‘net.
I remember those days well, as I started perusing the ‘net (back then we didn’t have terms like “surfing”) in the twilight period of the internet being largely pristine. My first net-capable computer was a beat-up, 10-year old IBM PC, which had been fitted with a 2400 baud modem. Armed with the modem numbers for a local “FreeNet,” I’d dial up and be Master of the Internet, all in text mode of course.
That said, ’94 was in fact a big “wow” period for the ‘net. Mosaic did bring graphical capabilities, and with it, the stark knowledge that we all were very, very bad at web design, at least in the beginning. Stuff like this was par for the course back in the day, and even this site was no exception. Yes, I too had the annoying “under construction” icons and stupid revolving e-mail graphics. It’s a period many of us from the old days would like to forget ever, ever happened. So, you can understand why I’d much rather not remember those days, and why 1994 wasn’t really the big breakthrough year CNN would like it to be.