The WWW and I

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee submitting his proposal for the creation of the World-Wide Web.

The Internet had been around for a while – since 1969 – but it was largely a collection of networked computers used by governments, researchers, and scientists. What Berners-Lee introduced was the notion of web pages, which made the Internet accessible and useful to the rest of us.

On the www anniversary, Berners-Lee was in the news for his comments warning of the need for action to address the web’s “downward plunge to a dysfunctional future.”

Sir Tim said people had realised how their data could be "manipulated" after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

However, he said he felt problems such as data breaches, hacking and misinformation could be tackled.

In an open letter also published on Monday, the web's creator acknowledged that many people doubted the web could be a force for good.

He had his own anxieties about the web's future, he told the BBC: "I'm very concerned about nastiness and misinformation spreading."

But he said he felt that people were beginning to better understand the risks they faced as web users.

In his letter, Sir Tim outlined three specific areas of "dysfunction" that he said were harming the web today:

• malicious activity such as hacking and harassment
• problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait
• unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions

These things could be dealt with, in part, through new laws and systems that limit bad behaviour online, he said. (Source: The BBC)

I fear the same things Berners-Lee does. (What he said!) And I’m all in favor of having the Internet clean up its act. But the 30th anniversary also got me thinking about what it was like back in the early going.

Even before the Internet was a “thing” that we spoke about, there were networks, and you used them to access mainframe computers.

In the mid-1970’s, before I went back to business school, I worked as a gofer in a bank. One of the things I occasionally had to go for was economic data from a company called Data Resources, Inc. 

The first time I tried to get at some of that data – unemployment rates in New England states, as I recall – it was via a dial-up connection, using some sort of odd pre-PC terminal, the system crashed. I thought I had done something wrong.

Fast forward a couple of years, and, while in business school, I used a timesharing program, on the Internet (before I knew it was the Internet) to run forecasting models for an econometrics course I was taking. That course led to my first post-business school job: creating (really terrible) forecasting models for businesses.

We worked on paper-based computer terminals, attached to a mainframe computer. If we wanted to work from home over the weekend, we could tote a 40 pound terminal home and dial-up the mainframe at a really low-slow rate. The connection was always lousy, and it was nearly impossible to get work done. Plus there was the problem of hyper-extending all the muscles in your arms lugging the “portable” terminal around. 

Over time, the paper-based terminals gave way to screens. And then there were PC’s that we used in lieu of terminals. And there was something called client-server, in which some of the computing power moved from the mainframe to smaller computers known as servers.

But whether it was paper-terminal to mainframe, or PC to server, what we were mostly doing was communicating with a computer, not with each other. And we were doing all this communicating using command lines or lines of code, not via some spiffy easy-peasy interface (even after PC’s made things a bit easy-peasier and spiffier).

Somewhere in the middle of the shift from paper-based terminals to PCs, I went to a company – Wang – that had a wonderful internal email system. Sure, if we wanted to speak with a client or someone outside the fold, we picked up a phone. But if we wanted to reach out to anyone in the company, we sent them an email. It was just great.

During my next stop along the magical mystery tour that was my career, the World Wide Web was born.

It took us a while to figure out what to do with it.

For most of us, the WWW and the Internet – which had now pretty much fused in our brains – meant that we needed to have a web presence. That meant putting up a couple of crude pages that provided the world with some basic information on your company and its products. (I can still remember what that first website for that company looked like. Dark, gloomy and ugly.)

Soon enough, the designs got better, web developer became a job category, and sites became more elaborate. But they were still primarily for providing marketing information online. eCommerce? Say what?

At the same time, Internet-based email systems were being introduced. Suddenly, you could communicate not just with your colleagues within the walls, but with customers, partners, vendors, and your friends and family. Exciting at first, but quickly taken for granted.

My next stop was at a company – BBN Planet –> GTE Internetworking –> Genuity that, in fact, was instrumental in the invention and development of the Internet back in the late 1960’s. (And was also the place where the @ sign for use in emails was first deployed.)

By the time I got there – the late 90’s – the World Wide Web, pushed along, by the way, by porn sites demanding better bandwidth and better graphics, eCommerce was starting to be a thing.

And despite all the spectacular failures – pets.com, kozmo.com – that eCommerce thing finally started to catch on. And even if you didn’t sell your wares online – and I always worked for companies with technology-based products with big price tags and long sales cycles, so not candidates for online commerce – your website was a lot more than just informational. It was for relationship building, for customer support, and for anything else you could think of.

And now? Even though you no longer have to type “www” in, the World-Wide Web is just about everything. It’s how we communicate with everyone, learn stuff, figure out answers to questions ultra-trivial and ultra-important, buy stuff, sell stuff, entertain ourselves, keep up with the news, stay in touch with everyone and everything.

I don’t miss the old days of primitive dial ups and ugly informational websites in the least. The Internet/World-Wide Web is great, and the benefits mostly outweigh the downsides. But those downsides are out there. And they’re big. And they’re really downside-y.

We need to listen very clearly to Tim Berners-Lee.

Meanwhile, thanks for the web, Tim.