Internet reaches middle age, though not many realize it

(Screenshot: Browsers old -- Lynx -- and new -- Firefox 3.5.3. Lynx was my go-to browser when I first went on the Internet in 1996.)

Published in The Workbench, Reloaded

Although few had even heard of this Internet thing (then known as the "information superhighway" until the early or mid-1990s, it got its real start 40 years ago this week.

It was Oct. 29, 1969 when the first two nodes of ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. And unless you were one of the guys on the inside, you really didn't know or care.

I was a bit of a late adopter. It was 1996 when I used a noisy modem to link into an Internet provider in a nearby city. My computer was an old Leading Edge XP, with an 8088 processor, Hercules graphics card, DOS 5, and 2400-bytes-per-second modem. I used Procomm to link up, and the text-only Lynx browser to surf ... more

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