Baby Boomers, World Books and the World Wide Web

     According to the United States Censor Bureau, a baby boomer is someone who was born between the years 1946 and 1964, when there was a noticeable increase in the birth rate. This was attributed to the end of World War II, and many countries in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia were affected and have a generation referred to as the "baby boomers". Okay, there it is, I guess I am a baby boomer since I was born in 1960.

     This baby boomer just wants to share some history to demonstrate what I think is just this incredible thing called the world wide web. I remember when I was a kid if you needed to do research for a state report or some other school assignment, you went to the world books...

If you needed more information or more than one source you went to the library and checked out books. That was it. Those were your options (period).

Kenneth Olsen (2/20/1926– 2/6/2011) was an American engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1957 said in 1977, "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in there home." Little did Mr. Olsen know that with the advent of the World Wide Web and increasing technological innovations, by 2013 there would be more than 10 million personal computers in use around the world. I found the map below from The Computer Industry Almanac showing the top ten usage countries and their statistics.


According to www.nethistory.info  - The first trials of the World Wide Web were at the CERN laboratories (one of Europe's largest research laboratories) in Switzerland in December 1990. By 1991 browser and web server software was available, and by 1992 a few preliminary sites existed in places like University of Illinois. By the end of 1992, there were about 26 sites on the world wide web.

The first browser which became popularly available to take advantage of this was Mosaic, in 1993. Mosaic was as slow as a wet week, and really didn't handle downloading pictures well at all - so the early world wide web experience with Mosaic, and with domestic modems that operated at one sixths of current modem speeds at best, were pretty lousy and really didn't give much indication of the potential of this medium.
 
On April 30, 1993 CERN's directors made a statement that was a true milestone in Internet history. On this day, they declared that WWW technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no fees being payable to CERN. This decision - much in line with the decisions of the earlier Internet pioneers to make their products freely available - was a visionary and important one.
The browser really did begin to change everything. By the end of 1994 there were a million browser copies in use - rapid growth indeed!!  

Then we really started to see growth. Every year from 1994 to 2000, the Internet saw massive growth, the like of which had not been seen with any preceding technology. The Internet era had begun. The first search engines began to appear in the mid 1990s, and it didn't take long for Google to come on the scene, and establish a dominant market position.
 
In the early days, the web was mainly used for displaying information. On line shopping, and on-line purchase of goods, came a little bit later. The first large commercial site was Amazon, a company which in its initial days concentrated solely on book markets. The Amazon concept was developed in 1994, a year in which some people claim the world wide web grew by an astonishing 2300 percent! Amazon saw that on-line shopping was the way of the future, and chose the book market as a field where much could be achieved.
 

By 1998 there were 750,000 commercial sites on the world wide web, and we were beginning to see how the Internet would bring about significant changes to existing industries. In travel for instance, we were able to compare different airlines and hotels and get the cheapest fares and accommodation - something pretty difficult for individuals to do before the world wide web. Hotels began offering last minute rates through specially constructed websites, thus furthering the power of the web as a sales medium. And things went even further - in some fields of travel, individuals would outline where they wanted to travel to and from, and travel companies would then bid for the business. All these developments rapidly changed the way traditional markets worked. In some industries, the world would never be the same again (you can say that again).

http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=7488

The world will never be the same again. I often remind my children that life is better now on this earth than it's ever been, and it just keeps getting better and better. Now, with so much information available to us and the ability to communicate with amazing speed, over great distances, we truly are becoming a global community. This gives me hope, for us and our planet. I like to think that as we become more and more of a global community we will foster more collaboration and find new and innovative ways to solve the worlds problems and live in peace. I Believe!!