Today, August 6th, 2021, marks the 30th anniversary of when Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched the first web page on the World Wide Web. I love reading about the early internet mostly as I remember some of it and kind of have a sort of nostalgic place in my heart for early websites and web design.
As of writing this, I’m a few months shy of 29 years old, making the internet just barely older than I am, a fact I would have to remind my students in Japan when I taught them computer science. This stuff is new and moving rapidly. Every year the internet changes and evolves, new trends take off, which is why I find it so exciting.
I’ve built my career on the web, as a Front-End Developer, I get to help grow it and add to it, hopefully in a positive and beautiful way. My father and brother both also owe their careers to the web and it was a driving force for my family’s settlement in DFW. My father, fresh out of seminary and needing a job, had experience working online and using Bulletin Boards as well as tinkering with computers since his childhood. At the time, 1994-1995, many companies in Dallas were hiring anyone with a pulse that knew about computers to come on as tech support for the Windows 95 rollout. Thus, my father started a career in tech which continues until this day.
I was fortunate to grow up with multiple computers in the home and my elementary school was given grants early on for great computer labs. So post-college, with the ink still wet on my film diploma, I got a job in marketing, helping to support developers at an agency in Dallas.
I’ve gone on to teach computer science, and grow my marketing/development career, all thanks to the world wide web. I’m young, the web is young, and just as I feel hopeful, with my thirties approaching, that it will be the best decade yet, and I hope likewise the web will find similar growth in its thirties alongside me.
So happy birthday WWW, and thank you Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
P.S. at the end of each of my quarterly tests while teaching computer science in Japan, I asked the same question: Who invented the World Wide Web?