Apress - On The Way To The Web

The Web is everywhere, reaching into the homes of everybody with a computer and a phone line. More and more of us have our computers on all the time, continuously receiving and sending messages and email, frequently looking for information, for pictures, for music.

I do most of my Christmas and birthday shopping online; most of our gifts for weddings and graduations are purchased online and shipped— gift-wrapped—directly to the recipients.

Rumors spread like wildfire on the Web. Sentimental stories (we call them “web weepers”) are passed along, jerking tears whether they’re true or not. Financial scams, ads for body enhancements, and political fund-raisers pump through the system.

Real news comes from volunteer reporters (bloggers, they’re called, whether they’re actually writing blogs or not), forcing the traditional news media to deal with stories they would have preferred to ignore. And those political fund-raisers have changed the shape of American elections, allowing some candidates to bypass the traditional fat-cat and PAC fund-raising methods.

All of this is so pervasive that it feels perfectly natural. It’s easy to forget how short a time it has been this way.

Twenty-five years ago, in 1983, I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, to take a job as book editor for Compute!, a magazine that covered all the major home computers: Commodore 64 and VIC, Atari 400 and 800, TRS-80, Apple, and a few others that popped up and faded away.

While I worked there—for only nine months—Apple launched their Lisa computer, which in many ways resembled the later Macintosh, and IBM announced the PC.

In other words, the two dominant personal computers did not yet exist. Meanwhile, the Internet, while it existed, was restricted to academics and Defense Department wonks—civilians like me need not apply.