You may be aware that it's the 25th birthday of Tim Berners-Lee's initial release of the Web.
I think I've been on it for about 20 years of that 25. I still remember the late family friend who brought home a boxed copy of Netscape and helped my family install it. That would've been around '93, mayyyyyybe '94. Windows 3.1 days, for sure.
From the first connection, I was in love. I shook with excitement about the endless possibilities about what I could find out there.
The sense of potential, of unexplored territory, has stuck with me ever since. The first times I saw strange languages used in someone else's everyday life - like Japanese - sparked a deep and insatiable curiosity. That curiosity has defined my life in the macro sense.
Nowadays, that incredible bridging of geography is so commonplace. We're all cosmopolitan. We all know Pocky comes from Japan and we can order it from Amazon. We all know every note to every song by Frenchmen called Daft Punk or Phoenix. We watch Korean StarCraft replays and don't mind the Korean text. The Chinese all watch American TV shows, professionally subtitled by dedicated amateurs, hours after airtime in the US. There's a multilingual, multinational cultural Utopia out there, just waiting for you to click.
In my estimation, that cosmopolitanism once began as a rare spark - "Holy crap, we can do that now! The Internet is awesome!" - for each of us. For me, it was '93.
I spent an "unhealthy" amount of time on the Web as a young'un, and we now live in times when a typical job involves 8 hours seated at a computer with Web access.
Looking back a little bit, I remember that the Internet gave my high school self summer jobs (IT, Web sites) and my fun activity in the evening (online gaming). That created a career in the Web business for me that I now enjoy daily. I have occasional gripes about work - who doesn't? - but my job is my thing; it's not like I'm selling shoes all day.
Looking back as far as I can, though, show me images from my earliest days on the WWW and you'll see my face soften into a smile. You'll be taking me back to my childhood.
So this is how I'll chill.. from '93 til...
)
Happy birthday, Web. I love you.
PS - My handheld computer just turned itself on to let me know I have a message from my girlfriend in Tokyo. If I knew any of that would happen in '93, I'd have been crying tears of joy.