Today is Google's 9th b-day. Wow, where has time gone. Seems like yesterday that I was sitting at work using my new Compaq Deskpro (more like dustpro), which was quite a change from my IBM 3090 mainframe terminal, checking out this new thing called the Internet. This was approximately 1993, and for you die-hards I know the Internet wasn't that new. However; to the majority of folks it was definitely new. Anyway, we had to be careful how much time we spent on the Internet because bandwidth was a premium. Since we had to use an emulation type of software to get to the Internet we were very discriminating in what we checked out - Big Brother had to be watching. At home, I would fire up the 9600 baud modem which just screammmmmmmed! Boy did I think life stood still when I purchased my new 14,400 baud. Then I went to heaven when I splurged and got a 28,800 baud modem. Back in those days Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Dogpile (a little later) ruled the search engines. There were no peer-to-peer programs to share all that good stuff, no blogs, and no wiki's. Anyone remember news groups and news group readers? The closest to a peer-to-peer network that I can think of were the bulletin boards. Occasionally I would forget the Internet and sign-on to one of these bulletin boards. At the time, I lived in the Dallas, Tx area and there were plenty boards to try out.
Life really has changed: No more ALC, COBOL, PACBASE, WAAPDSUTs, JCL, TSO, CICS, and on-call from H-E double toothpicks!
I like where we are and where we're heading. The Internet really has improved life or as least our ability to gather knowledge. I even like useless knowledge. It's all fun to collect. Has Google made a contribution to knowledge? I believe so. Happy Birthday Google!!!
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