Welcome to my lil corner out here on the web. A lot has changed since the night I dialed in the first time back in 1995. Biggest difference would be bandwidth, we where happy with 14400 connections initially and then 28800, 33600 baud, ( bits per second ) to when I was in Kansas City, MO sitting on a fat asynchronous 768 ( just shy of 1mb ) DSL line to today where download speeds of 500mb ( 500 times what the initial area ISP’s had available ) are common place in the home.
There where years lost learning, from these things called books, I’m sure some will remember the size of the text manuals from that time. There used to be these random swap meets monthly out at the fair grounds the Super Computer Sale, where you could go and get parts, books, monitors, software, or a whole new rig, at prices that beat out what the big box store had so it was always worth the price of admission. These sales where the best thing until some white box stores opened up locally, My favorite was Digilink Computers on Westnedge next to Toys R Us.
Fast forward almost 30 years, cannot hardly believe that much time has past since the first night. Now lets look at what hasn’t changed. The web is still basically a huge file server, where search engines attempt to feed us back the most relevant content based on parameters we ask for results on. Of course the list of content links is ever laden heavily with advertisements enticing us to click! This content is indexed by the words in the posts, pictures and ranked through some crazy algorithms that mortals don’t care about as long as the results provided are accurate. Web servers are still predominately IP based, and we use DNS, ( Domain Name Servers ), everyone now uses SSL ( Secure Socket Layer ) always as the browser companies finally started to give a rip about peoples security, or prevent fruitless class action lawsuits, sites now highlight when your accessing them in an insecure fashion which used to be the norm. Instead of all things being files ( html pages ) now are created via scripts from data base entries and thrown back to the visitor in an quick manner we used to only dream of; while images, documents, java script and cascading style sheets are all still provided as files. Oh yeah – Size still matters though most will never have a concept of it as we seem to have forgotten what it used to look like waiting for a page to draw in our computers web browser.