What's Happened Up To Now...
Exactly one gajillion years ago, there were dinosaurs roaming the Earth.
This was the earliest beginnings of the Internet. Because dinosaurs were - depending on your own beliefs - reptilian, birdlike, and purple. It was obvious that the only way they could avoid a disaster like, say, an asteroid crashing into the Earth, was to post an ad on Craigslist for deep core drillers to plant explosives and blow it up.
Obviously, this did not work.
Could it be because of their tiny, pathetic brains? Or their short-short arm
s? Or their bubblicious booties? Definitely. But the other problems quickly became apparent. It wasn't until hundreds of millions of years later, though, that Sputnik was launched and the real story of the Internet began.
Back in the early 50s, we were in the Cold War(tm). Russia decided that it didn't want to not exist, so it shot a spaceship into the skies. That spaceship was Sputnik, which would allow Russians to wear special hats and hear voices from outer space that sounded like other Russians.
Meanwhile, almost a hundred years earlier, MCI wanted to find out how to screw people out of more money at some point in the future, and also realized that laying railroad tracks was hard work. So in hopes of early retirement, they started stuffing telephone wire into the railroad tracks.
About this time, Professors from large, Ivy League colleges were saying, "Hey, the telephone's great and all, but we don't really want to talk to other professors on the phone... yuck!"
So they put a plan together where only a handful of colleges were hooked up together by big wires run right through future construction sites, ensuring that there would be many backhoes cutting through the delicate wires and knocking out our Internet connections just when we're updating our MySpace profile.
Meanwhile, college students and old hackers were coining terms like 'hacking' to mean breaking into systems (instead of programming), and broke into many of the few colleges connected together. Although, they realized that there were no web pages, chat, or MUDs, so it was really no fun.
Then big companies with even bigger names, like Worldcom, realized that they could make EVEN MORE money if they made the Internet a commercial. They worked with ISPs around the country to setup a high priced connections using fascinating, new technology (like phone lines) to connect people (for a fee) to these government owned lines.
As the Internet grew, the Library of Congress spent billions of dollars converting all their files to WAIS (World Access Information Service). This happened just about the time that WAIS failed and the WWW (World Wide Web) became popular!
As the Internet became international and millions of people began coming together to unify a system in which we could all communicate, thrive, and grow with information in the age of technology, all looked good...
Then Microsoft came, and standardization was non-existant. Netscape's valuable Javascript was renamed, and changed to VB Script, then changed back to Javascript. DHTML was invented and Active Channels and ActiveX controls!
No one really understands these, and they only work on Microsoft's web browser (even though the other 65% of the world on the Internet either isn't running a system that can do these well or isn't running Windows).
So now, with more than 14 different web browsers, running 6 different versions of Javascript, and compatible with 4 different versions of HTML, we live in a world of Information, Connectivity, and (Sorry, Server returned extended information... sentence aborted... error 500).
-Hunter
