In 1992, an English physicist, working in Switzerland made public this nifty little tech project he had been working on to share documents and data more easily within his research organization.  This little gadget he had invented was what we now know as the World Wide Web, that sprawling interconnected series of files that seems to dominate our lives now.  Everywhere you go, you see addresses for web sites plastered on billboards, book covers, newspapers etc.  It is a major economic force now, spawning entirely new service markets and changing the way companies to business on a global scale.

It has also has changed how we communicate, how we learn, how we socialize, how we spend our money and how we spend our free time.  There are very few aspects of our daily lives that have not been in some way altered because of the coming of this great new technology.  And back in the early/mid-90s, this was the coolest thing going.  Email, the Web, Internet Chat, Instant Messaging.  It was all amazing and people were at the same time both terrified and entranced by it.  The frenzy got so bad that it created an economic bubble, that when burst, took years to recover from (some would say we're still recovering from it).  For many of us, we were seeing the world around us change in very dramatic ways, it was a shift in the way things were done, on a similar level to how the assembly line transformed manufacturing, and as a result industry across the globe.

For those who got into it early, most remember their first webpage, their first email address, some of the first sites and systems they ever visited.  For me, it actually dates back to before the web was around.  Yes kids, the Internet did exist  prior to the Web, the term was coined around the time of the merger between the original ARPANET and  NSFNet.  The Internet in anything approximating its current incarnation really came into being in 1984 with the rise of TCP/IP as the communication standard.  History lessons aside, some of us do remember the Internet prior to the Web, and it was all text.  Yes, even with the explosion of the GUI-based computer through the 80s and early 90s, the Internet was just text on a screen, and usually some sort of terminal screen at that!  My first experiences with the Internet were probably around '89/'90 as a wee little munchkin of 7 or 8 going into my dad's office at Penn State on weekends to sit down at his Mac Classic and play with this nifty new toy he got hooked up to at work he was calling the Internet.  At the time, I had no concept of the technical bits behind any of this.  To me, it was like having access to a really really big program just on his computer.  The closest thing I had ever seen to anything like this was the card catalog at my local library.

I used systems such as Usenet and BITNET in bits and pieces originally, but my first memorable experience with this grand new technology was in 1991 with this system called Gopher  out of the University of Minnesota.  For those of you who never used Gopher, it was essentially a system like Lexus Nexus, or the new Google Scholar service where documents such as academic papers, magazine articles and a few books, were manually entered into this giant library system.  It accomplished this through connecting up systems such as WAIS, Archie, Veronica, FTP sites and Usenet.  Using a telnet client and a few basic commands, you could browse, what was at the time, a mind-boggling amount of data.  I was able to read random articles on topics ranging from botany to particle physics.  None of the information was even remotely comprehensible to a little kid like me at the time, but I read it anyway, I drank it all up despite my lack of comprehension.  I was reading these things not because I had a particular interest in them, I was reading them simply because I could and this astounded me.  In retrospect, I now realize that while my dad said he was going in on the weekends to get work done, his main purpose was to bring me in to use this technology that he knew was going to be very very important someday and he wanted to give me a head-start on it.  He spent more time on those weekend trips sitting next to me as we worked together to figure out the strange commands, to figure out errors when we encountered them, and reading all the random little bits of fact we came across.

To me, there's always to some extent been that sense of wonder when I discover some previously unknown corner of the Internet, some new tool, some new resource of knowledge and power.  As an individual, I have instant access to more information than any other individual at any previous point in history.  Before the Internet, you were bound by your own knowledge, the knowledge of those around you, and whatever resources you had available nearby.  Even with the addition of the telephone and radio, with instant voice communication across the vast reaches of the globe, the ability to find and sort data was left to the human brain.  The limits are hard to understand for those of us who have lived so long with this technology.  It all is really amazing if you pause to think about it.  The power it gives us, the knowledge to make better decisions, the way it has improved (and in some ways admittedly worsened) our lives, all of it not possible, not reachable by most people until a mere 14 years ago.  Now, even people with memories of times before the Internet (i.e. anyone over 30) take this all for granted, as if it were as common and natural a thing as sliced bread. 

Are our memories so short that it doesn't even take 20 years for something to become so common place?  And while it's been 14 years technically since the Web hit the scene, the average person still wasn't aware of it until around 1996/1997, so for most people, this newfangled doodad is only a decade old!

So I ask you, when did the Internet stop being amazing?