Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:00a.m.
This Wednesday marks 40 years since boffins in California first got two computers to exchange information, in the process inventing what would become the internet. Little did they know four decades on their grandkids would use it primarily for distributing pictures of cats with captions attached.
But seriously, if there's another invention which has so transformed our lives in the past half-century, I'm certainly not aware of it. The internet is surely bigger than TV, radio and the Segway, combined.
I'm not sure when it was I first heard the term 'internet' or 'World Wide Web', but as a kid of the 1980s, I was definitely aware there was something going on. I had a pile of computer magazines, from memory all dated sometime in 1984 - where I got them god only knows – and one in particular had an article about something called
MUD, which stood for Multi-User Dungeon. Set up in the late 1970s,
MUD was a kind of text-based
World of Warcraft for the original, dice-rolling kind of
Dungeons & Dragons nerd. You dialled into it via something my Commodore 64 manual called a 'modem', which cost, according to my magazines, about twice what my computer cost.
Knowing the purchase of a Commodore 64 alone had probably driven my mother into the poor house, I never asked for a modem. To be honest, I'm not even sure I would have known what to do with one anyway. There might be a lot online these days for eight-year-olds, but the internet of the 1980s was a vastly different place.
I don't recall my high school's computers being online, strangely enough. I went round to a friend's place in '95 or so, his parents were at the wealthier end of the income scale and they had the internet at home, which was a big deal then. All I remember from the afternoon is finding a website detailing how evil Bert of
Sesame St was, then we got bored and went and played Stratego – an old-fashioned tabletop game – instead.
We never had a computer at home through much of the '90s – unless you count the old Commodore 64 – so my youthful enthusiasm for all things digital was left to rot (it's okay, I filled the gap with an unhealthy rugby league obsession).
A few years later I was studying at WINTEC (then called Waikato Polytechnic), which had two computers connected to the internet for student use. If you wanted to use one, you had to book it weeks in advance, an hour at a time – which meant it was pretty much useless for study (and there was no Wikipedia!). The following year, 1999, suddenly there was an entire room of PCs online. I thought this was pretty cool, until I discovered a room next door full of Macs, also online – which baffled me, to be honest. Growing up with computers in the 1980s, and going without for much of the '90s, I was still of the belief computers of different makes and models couldn't communicate, because they used different programming languages.
It's embarrassing to admit now, but I debated long and hard with my flatmate that Macs must use a different internet. She was right, of course. It soon dawned on me that perhaps I could find an old modem and hook up my Commodore 64 - though I'm sure it would have been worse than using IE6 and trying to use Facebook.
Since then, one by one, almost every facet of my existence has been co-opted into the internet. And now, it's hard to imagine what life would be like without it. I work online, distribute my music online, talk to friends online, watch video/TV online. Last week, I even went online to find a countdown timer so I knew when the pasta was done cooking.
It's not what the military-funded scientists slaving away on computers the size of houses in the late '60s probably had in mind when they set up the ARPANET, but hey.