March 24, 1992. What's online?
The world wide web is still on it's toddler years, and has not even touched the Philippine soil.
Perhaps, I and those people born in the early 1990's were the digital babies, born in the 'transitionary' period from the 'old world' to the 'digital world', but I would not get access to the Web, and the internet for that matter, until 12 years after.
One thing that I have to unlearn and deconstruct in my being after thoroughly studying the foundations of the internet is that the terms 'internet' and 'world wide web' are not two same concepts. For all the years I've been logging on my multiple social networking accounts and googling high school assignments, I thought internet and the web are just plain synonyms. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the two are distinctly different (but maybe interdependent) things. Much less knowing that the internet began on the middle of the 20th century while the web debuted only in 1991.
So what's happening during March 1992?
Microsoft and Fox Software announce that they intend to merge. Under the terms of the final agreement, Dave Fulton and other Fox employees will join Microsoft. So Microsoft and the other softwares were already developed while even my parents didn't have access to a PC.
America Online had its initial public offering on March 19, 1992. Just 5 days before my exact birthday, AOL opened its stocks to the public to expand its capital. The province where I am in might have had gigantic computers by then, but I bet no one in our place, nor even in our country, knew all what the hullabaloo of the web is. For them, the term online meant a telephone caller, while the term Web, is for spiders and the dusty ceilings. Net implied a fisherman's tool.
Internet Society (or ISOC) is chartered. The Internet Society (ISOC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education and policy. They are dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world.
World-Wide Web released by CERN. The Web has been exclusive to the CERN from its conception in 1991 until March 1992. So I think I can be proud with the fact that I grew up in parallel with the growth of the internet, but it grew up so faster as compared to my growth that by the end of 1992, there were already 50 web servers in the world. In April 2001, There were 24 million web servers! Had I grown up as fast as the internet, I would have been very big by now. The internet started with only one Web server located at CERN in 1991.
NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps). Ooops, so much for techie stuff.
Needless to say, the web grew up so exponentially in the past few decades. We have seen the birth and death of Friendster (and that was the end of an era!), we have seen the different interfaces of Facebook, different themes of Google, the obsolete-ness of the Internet Explorer. The internet gave Charisse Pempengco worldwide fame, while many young men sourced eroticism from the Web's pornsites. With the internet, we have endless possibilities.
So before I end this blog, let me tell you an anecdote of my life. Haha.
As a kid of an OFW dad, I could remember countless stories of my mom writing in yellow pad and mailing my dad as their only source of communication, letters that took 2 months to arrive in Libya. My mother would oftentimes show me old letters in dusty envelopes she had been taking care of in the years. When I was six, we would record our voices in blank tapes, conversing with a radio, then my mom would send it to my dad, also taking months to arrive. There were crucial times, like when my paternal grandfather died in October 1995, and my dad knew all about it in January of 1996. Communication was really hard that time.
Now, just recently, I had to send a business mail to Ortigas for an academic interview. Imagine my 'tenseness' upon my first entry to the UP Post Office. I didn't know how to send a real mail. Really, our culture of sending mail has changed, I can even predict that Post Offices will die in a few years. Also, one of my uncles died here in the Philippines 3 weeks ago, and my parents in the Middle East knew it earlier than me, and that I was so surprised that they arrived for the wake a day after. They knew about my uncle's death via personal communication in the internet. So maybe, Internet doesn't just change lives. Internet also changes deaths. Haha.
Anyhoo, that's it for March 1992. Let's all be witnesses as to what directions the web will take from this day onwards.
Sources:
http://www.google.com.ph/imglanding
http://www.besthistorysites.net/
file:///C:/Users/teptep/Desktop/Junior%20-%20Second%20Sem/The-History-of-Microsoft-1992.htm
file:///C:/Users/teptep/Desktop/Junior%20-%20Second%20Sem/comm150Windows_3.1x.htm
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