PART 3: THE WEB

The real beginning of the end was the discovery I made one day while surfing the Internet. I was going through some "Gopher" sites, downloading pictures or software or games or something, when I saw this link to download "Mosaic." This was around 1994, maybe 1993. Anyway, I read the description of what the program was, but I couldn't understand what it was supposed to do. It sounded interesting, however, and it looked like it was coming from somewhere I recognized, maybe NCSA, who also had the Telnet software I liked to use on the Mac to log into some FreeNet accounts I had set up in a few places outside of the university. Anyway, I downloaded and "unstuffed" the Mosaic program, and I ran it. What was this? Color pictures embedded into documents right on the Internet? World Wide Web? Color fonts with other formatting? HTML? Hmmmm ... I posted a few messages on some university UseNet newsgroups to see if anyone had an idea of what this was. Nobody had heard of Mosaic, except for one guy who basically explained that it was some European thing created by CERN, but it hadn't caught on in the U.S. yet. Give it time, he said.

Well, it wasn't long before everybody was abuzz about Mosaic and the World Wide Web. I checked out HTML and soon discovered that it was very similar to the markup language I had used for LaTeX, but had given up for the ease of AppleWorks and Microsoft Word. I mocked up a few Web pages and got the hang of most of it pretty quick. Soon, I was making little Web pages with lists of links and such. It was alright, and it looked like fun. My favorite FTP sites were quickly becoming Web pages and it was easier to browse through them without doing all the command-line Unix that I'd become so accustomed to over the previous few years.

But the Web was, for the most part, dull. Yes, there were a few pretty pages with some good graphics, etc., but there was sort of a dumbing down of the computing interface. Pointing and clicking were becoming the norm, and I was personally becoming bored with the online world, apart from doing my email and tinkering with making my own Web pages. Without my own Web server, however, I was pretty much restricted to saving files on my own computers and using them to organize my own links to the outside world.

At the same time, people's CompuServe and America Online accounts (two systems I NEVER used) were going Web-based also, and the whole Internet experience was shifting away from command-line Unix to point-and-click client-server interfaces. This was logical enough, and it worked well for people. There were two facets to computing: Web browsing and client-server email, FTP, and a handful of other programs (like FrontPage for making Web sites), and personal computing, which involved making documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and databases. There even evolved the ability to sort of make it all work off your desktop, like with Outlook, and there was an "Office-ication" of the Web. It all looked and worked the same way, roughly. And this was the trend for about 10 years, roughly between 1995 and 2005.