We’re all so dependent on the Web now the fact that it’s such a recent development is easy to forget. Equally, at least for those who were there at the time, it’s easy to overlook the fact that there was online life before the Web.
My introduction to online connectivity came courtesy of Compuserve sometime in the late 1980s. It was a collection of message forums and software libraries that was accessed through a dial-up modem. The earliest incarnations of these had a unit that a telephone handset was plugged into. The unit converted signals from the local computer into sounds which it fed into the microphone of the telephone. The telephone earpiece received the sounds from the remote computer which the unit converted to signals for the local computer. So all the communication between the two computers could be transmitted as tones over the phone line.
By the time I got online the world had moved on to dedicated units that plugged into the phone line on one side and the computer on the other. These ran at the dizzying speed of 56Kbps but still relied on a telephone line. If you only had one phone line, looking something up online had the same effect on your telephone availability as calling a friend to ask.
As is well-known, Tim Berners-Lee came up with the concept of the World Wide Web which used the Internet to provide access to a vast range of information sources. In 1993 Mosaic was introduced as one of the early browsers and probably increased interest in the Web because it was so easy to use.
Even in the mid-nineties the Web was beginning to make its mark although by 1997 only ten per cent of the UK population had access to it. In the autumn of that year I was asked to speak to a group of car dealers about the merits of the Web. I’m not sure the manufacturer’s representative expected me to tell their dealers to hold off for at least six months and see what happened.
There were various problems with the whole system at that time, the main one being the connection speeds. At 56Kbps it took an age for a graphics-heavy webpage to download. There was also the problem of getting the site in front of potential customers. It took time for the web crawlers to be developed to provide the depth and breadth of search engine capability that we have today. Infoseek had been around since about 1994 and Lycos arrived in 1995 followed by Yahoo! Search. By 1997 AskJeeves was popular but over time Google became so ubiquitous that people referred to Googling something rather than searching for it.
By the early 2000s broadband was becoming a possibility and I signed up to NTL’s service which connected at 512Kbps. By the middle of the decade around half of UK homes had a broadband connection with average speed of around 4 Mbit/s.
The reach of the Web increased in 2010 when Apple introduced the iPad. Two years later they brought out the iPad mini and we began getting calls from journalists wanting to know how it was going to transform the events industry. We said ‘It won’t’ and, not surprisingly, it didn’t.
It was around this time that the people I refer to as The Evangelists discovered ‘The Cloud’. They began to make extraordinary claims for The Cloud, missing the fact that The Cloud is just another was of referring to a service delivered over the Internet by a remote computer. It was something that had been around since Compuserve. Sadly they’ve driven the market to a position where any organisation offering an Internet-based service has little option but to describe it as Cloud based because the Evangelists have convinced customers that there’s something special about The Cloud.
It’s been a little over 30 years since I first dipped my toe in the online waters. Things have moved at an extraordinary pace in that time. Sadly it hasn’t all been to our benefit. These days the Web provides a forum for every nutter, conspiracy theorist, supremecist of one sort or another and anybody else who wants to make the most outrageous claims with no supporting evidence. It almost seems that the Web has brought us to a position where the bigger the lie is, the more likely people are to believe it merely because they saw it on a website. It seems likely that society is going to have to find a way to deal with this problem.
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