…the Internet was launched at CERN.
The news today is full of enough stories about how far we have come since then, so I won’t bother adding yet another one.
Instead I will try to remember where I was back then. That would be as a first year university student who was elected to get access to the university’s Unix server AND to get my own email address. Then I followed computer science classes in front of huge CRT screens and looked at the info on the network between exercises (we didn’t call it browsing yet) . I remember looking for R.E.M. lyrics with the gopher, playing a MUD and telling friends about this amazing database wealth of all sorts of thinkable and unthinkable information that I had suddenly gained access to. And then week by week the www moved in and NCSA’s Mosaic become the place to spend idle time between classes.
What a privilege to have been right there when it happened.
And what a reminder to always be open to emerging technologies, some of which may just fade away as easily and better forgotten fads, and others that will transform the world in ways we can’t even start to imagine.