10 years

This June marked my 10th anniversary of being connected to the Internet. Zounds what changes have taken place. (Zounds - I cannot even count correctly. It is my 11th anniversary. June 1994)

The Internet was still controlled by the NIS (National Institute of Standards) when I started which meant no commercial sites. There were also no web sites by individuals (that I was aware of). Jerry Yang (one of the two Yahoo founders) was passing around a list of 200 web sites. This was pretty much the known universe then. I think Google know reports something like 8 billion plus web pages.

There was no Internet Explorer or Netscape. I used a browser provided by my ISP at the time - Netcom.

Very primitive email but it did not matter as there were damn few people that were using it; mainly university's. I remember when the first spam message was sent - by a pair of lawyers.

Also no viruses or trojans or spyware or .....

Gopher, Archie and Veronica where the names of Internet services that everyone used to find/retrieve files.

I remember the first time I accessed a web site in another country (the UK). I was astounded that I was able to do it, view pictures on the site and all of the this was done fairly fast and for free. Well except for the monthly fee to my ISP. Pretty amazing stuff after dealing since the early 80's with text only dialup services like CompuServe and various BBS's.

And bless the powers that be, I have been on DSL since Jan. 2000. How did I ever servive those primitive years. LOL.

Dick