Google is Seven!
Everyone's favourite - struggling for a catch-all term here, because after all, Google is the internet - has apparently been around for seven years!! If I cared more, I would look beyond the fancy frontage on the search engine and find out what the story is, but I'm at work, and I'm working n stuff, and suffice to say the whole turning the L into a 7 thing probably means it's their seventh birthday. Oh, and the bits of cake.So happy birthday.
The boss reckons the internet has been around for twenty years, which I dispute, cos when I say internet, I mean some kind of usable thing that can be used by people who haven't done fourteen years hard labour learning about - words failing me again - binary code and god knows what else.
And besides that the point is, Google, the stalker's best friend, is seven.
posted by Jessie at 00:03
9 comments
9 Comments:
I would say mid-nineties too - which is when my technologically advanced friend Tara (are you out there, Tara?!) first showed me the joy of irc chatrooms... and we had a computer online at school, with the images switched off to save bandwidth! The horror.
Unless they started that up in 1996, of course and I was just a slow adaptor.
Jo I'm sure you're the definition of early adopter.
The internet is actually 21, because the first TCP/IP network was going in 1984.
But Mid 90s is when it was opened up to commercial interests, so I can accept 1995. And also '95 was when CompuServe went all internet too. And also because FidoNet died in the mid 90s too (well, began to die).
And though I am (quite obviously) a huge nerd, if you really want to know how old it was, you should ask Al Gore.
(Jimmy@Work)
*coughGEEEEKcough*
Jimmy, if you're such a big nerd, you should've figured out how to choose the 'other' option and not be anonymous ;)
Oh I forgot about that one, like I forgot my blogspot password so couldn't be all normal and everything.
And so what if Im a Geek! YOU LOVE IT.
I first used the interweb when I was in 6th form...so that was.. 199....7? *counts on fingers* Yes! 97! And me and my friend would stay up and talk to people in chatrooms and then marvel at being able to talk to people in ... AMERICA.. oooh
I think 1995 was when I first encountered a browser. Up till then I'd been a loyal green screen user. (Actually I was fond of a neat-but-expensive gas plasma screen that IBM built that displayed everything in orange... crisp characters like you get now with LCD screens, but in a single colour.)
1992 is when I first managed to send an e-mail from my system at the European Space Agency in Italy to a friend with IBM UK. He had to apply to be allowed to e-mail externally, and so I had to wander up to an unattended computer at IBM's education center at La Hulpe in Belgium, connect to his system, hope he was logged on, and send him directions on how to gain external e-mail access using his system's logon prompt.
Way back in 1985 in my first job, I was e-mailing and IMing people around the world using IBM's corporate network. Made friends in several countries that I'm still in touch with. They were starting to hook our network (VNet) up to others, but it was very experimental and we couldn't justify doing it in NZ.
These things get better all the time.
Some argue the "web" began in '91 I think, but it certainly didn't take off that year. I reckon 95/96 is sort of the crux. In 1996, students burnt Otago entire internet traffic budget by April or May -- which I think ably demonstrates and explosion in growth. The previous year had been on budget, and then suddenly it wasn't even in the right ballpark...
I remember hounding my father to hook up the phone modem when I was real little cos I wanted to talk on the bulletin boards, but he didn't want to cos he was paranoid about virii.
Finally around 1995 he complied and we got the internet - but sadly my 486 was only BARELY running windows 3.11 and struggling to load images and text, and dialup was a pittance 16kbps or something.
Then I discovered html, and made unpublished websites, and Dad got so impressed that he upgraded us to a Hewlett Packard on win95 and we rejoiced because we had the internet.
AND THEN I discovered IRC, and downloading music. And it took a week to download a song. Isn't it amazing how many people started their internet lives on IRC :)
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