31 August 2004
Sherman…set the way back machine to February 1995….
Posted by Mick (SplaTT) Stanic under: Digital Thoughts; Virtual Reality / Virtual Worlds / Simulation .
Lets go back in time to February 1995…I’d been playing around and working with the web for around 4 years (on and off), Mosaic Communications had just recently beome Netscape Communications, Netscape 0.9 had only been out for 4 months and BillG and the guys at Microsoft had only just woken up to the value of the internet.
Life was good and i had just started writing an article for the Virtual Reality Association of Australia’s newsletter in which i covered internet and internet related VR information and sites. Each month after the “paper” newsletter was sent out, i made a version of my article up for my website.
“Surf’s Up Edition 1″ covered a variety of things including; Mecklerweb.com which went on to become internet.com, Pizza Hut’s new online pizza ordering site (which ran on a 486/66MHz machine and had a 56kbps modem link to the internet), VRML or the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (which looks like is being replaced by X3D) and info on both FAQ’s and mailing lists and where to find them.
Being 1995, the article includes such terms as; “surfing the web”, “cowabunga”, “dude”, “cyberpunk”, “IRC”, “newbie”, “MUD’s, MOO’s and MUSE’s”, “information wants to be free” and of course, the term made famous by Al Gore, “the information super highway”.
The interesting bit has to be right at the begining, when i mention the web’s population of the time…”between 25 and 35 million people”..the current figures for the worlds web population (depending on who you believe) puts the figure at around 450 million people….wow….
1995 was the year after i realised that i really enjoyed this internet thing and decided to make a full time career out of it, something that to this day i do not regret…times have changed, and the number of internet users didn’t quite get to where we all expected as quick as we all predicted (world domination will happen eventually ;), but it is an amazing technology and has no doubt been one of the few inventions that has had the biggest impact on human kind along with the invention of the Gutenberg press and the steam engine….well…thats how I feel about it anyway….
(PS. If you don’t understand this post’s heading…click here)
Leave a Reply
101 views