20 Years On The Web
Fri, 11 Oct 2013
On the 3rd October 1993 I sent out an email announcing the opening of my first website. At the time there were about 250 websites in the world and in a pre-search engine world the way to the get world out about your site was to post a message to the Usenet forums. Other website owners would link to your site and you would return the favour. In this way the early Web began to grow in to what we have now.
My first site was about the topic of Virtual Reality (part of it is still available online here). Both VR and the Web arrived in the public mind around the same time, and both were seen by many as the "next big thing". Interestingly, VR - the "sexiest" of the two technologies - stuttered over the next few years and failed to catch on, where as the Web.. Well you know, you are using it.
The early Web was an exciting thing to be part of. The journey from geek to ubiquity was an incredibly fast one and people now find strange to think that there was a time when it didn't exist.
In those early days, together my my colleagues at Loughborough and Derby Universities, I would run "cybercafes" and internet show-and-tell events at night clubs, public events and conferences to show people how the Web worked. For many of these people it was the first time they had seen the technology.
These days there is a similar feeling to the interest surrounding 3D printing. Just like the early Web, I demonstrate it to people who've heard about it but have never seen it. I encourage it's use and try to get people to think about how it will affect their lives. I do wonder though if over the next 20 years it will go the way of the Web, or remain a specialist niche like Virtual Reality.
