Posted on 03/12/2014 2:44:35 PM PDT by ThethoughtsofGreg
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web since its public release by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, prompting the Pew Research Center to release its latest re03-technologies-that-would-be-hard-to-give-upport, entitled The Web at 25 in the U.S. The report looks at a combination of objective metrics for Internet penetration, as well as survey results of how users perceive the Internet. On the whole, the internet has fundamentally changed the way we interact with the worldfrom creating content, to interacting with our government, to taking care of our health. Regardless of how people use it, the Internet is clearly becoming more essential. In 2006, only 38 percent of adults said that the Internet would be difficult to give up. Today, that number has surged to 53 percent. But, 62 percent of Internet veteransindividuals who began using the Internet before 2000reported that the Internet would be very difficult to give up. Only 46 percent of users who started in the 21st century agreed.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanlegislator.org ...
Pictures of cats.
Porn.
Photos of dinner plates.
Porn.
Stupid teen girls making faces.
Porn.
Tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories.
Porn.
i wonder what the firs message was ?
World Wide Web??? Where can I print it out so I can read it tonight? ;-)
“Watidlookliiiik?/”
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be on the early Internet in college, when it was still just text based messaging and almost nothing else.
I would have a hard time giving it up, and envy the kids today growing up with this vast resource. I believe I have learned more on the web than all my schooling combined, including my college work. Most of it is practical knowledge, but I have also pursued areas of personal interest for knowledge’s sake, and done some refreshing of subjects I had forgotten.
I seldom set foot in a store or bank anymore, and I save a bunch of money. And then there’s the access to music and other media. Just amazing from the days growing up with 3 channels on a black and white TV and am/fm radio.
It can be abused/wasted like any tool, but if you take advantage of it with reasonable care, it can really enrich your life.
Thank you, Mr. Gore. Your invention enables me to get the real news instead of leftist propaganda.
My wife and I were recently researching a biblical issue.
Referenced dozens of translations, bible dictionaries and other resources in a couple of hours.
Got to talking about what would have been needed a few decades ago to do a similar caliber of research.
Would have probably taken several days, access to an unusually high quality library, and the expertise to know where to look.
IOW, we couldn’t have done it.
I remember hearing over and over about the internet breaking the monopoly of the liberal media and the news, and ushering in an opening for a wave of conservatism. Yet, after all these intervening years, I’ve only seen America sink further and further into the muck of socialist statism, and the supposedly ‘more savvy’ younger, internet generations become more and more like brainwashed drones.
Oh, well. I was pretty late to the internet myself (1998). Used to see it much more positively than negatively, at first. Not so sure anymore. It’s certainly led me to have a much, much lower opinion of the American populace than I did beforehand. Lately I’ve actually started toying with the idea of just cutting the internet cord altogether, and excising it entirely from my life. Just as had done many years back with modern tv/pop-culture, and now find myself slowly doing with the news/politics realm as well.
As more and more people get into using the Internet, working in IT for years, and seeing the potential of disastrous large scale security breeches, the more inclined I’ve become to ‘unplug’ from it as much as I can, but not entirely.
Lets just say that I try to maintain as little of a digital ‘footprint’ as possible.
We’ll probably be able to tell our grandchildren of our time using the Internet while it was still free, like during the “Wild West”. They’ll be shocked when we tell them of such things as 56k Internet, Napster, uncapped bandwidth, being able to start a website out of our homes, and unregulated free email. lol
The first packet network was ARPAnet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Shutdown_and_legacy
Then came NSFnet:
And then the forced transition of the NSFnet by NSF Program Manager Steven Wolf from a privately operated (and NSF funded) communications network to one which used commercial links in 1995. It was this last transition from the public to the private sector when the commercial Internet was born, fulfilling the vision held by Steven Wolf when he terminated the direct NSF funding for the original NSFnet and instead provided funding to the NSFnet participants that could be used only to connect each other with a new, private network that eventually became the public Internet that we know and love today, and which was started with this seed money.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented a foundational information access and display protocol named called the World Wide Web and which is one of the main protocols that rides on today’s Internet, but WWW is NOT the Internet and would be useless without an actual Internet that uses packet switching protocols and equipment first built and put into practice by DARPA and then by the NSF along with their many commercial partners who built the actual equipment and wrote the actual software, partners that I might add that eventually morphed into the mighty Cisco and others.
I know these things because I was involved with the inception and demise of the NSFnet and subsequent experimental high-speed networks used to interconnect the former NSFnet participants.
"Oooooooo...they have the Internet on Computers now!!'
-Homer Simpson
My first ‘log on’ was about 1993-4. One of the several local BBS systems (Dallas-Ft. Worth area) had a portal to the Internet. Users could only use it for a few minutes at a time.
By 1994, Prodigy and some other services also had portals to the Web.
By 1995, local ISPs were offering dial-up services.
Ironically, a SWBell Telephone rep said they didn’t upgrade their phone lines because they figured the Internet was a passing fad.
I got my first cable internet connection in late 2002 in nwArkansas. It was a whopping 1 mbps.
ARPANet Computer.
Maybe Johnny will lend you his copy after he finishes reading it.
Well what ever you do don’t tell me how it ends!!!!
Wouldn’t dream of it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.