The internet is 25 years old

Although we think of the internet as the biggest repository of knowledge, it is barely a young adult.

I remember exploring this strange net with my brother, on an underscore-flashing screen. I guess it was MS DOS, although I seem to remember it was white, so perhaps it was something else. Did Netscape have a search function? I can’t even remember what the computer looked like. Was it a rainbow-striped Sinclair? The details have faded. I don’t even know how old we were.

We were excited about what we’d heard about this web that was world wide. We were ready to discover all sorts of things on it. My first Internet search was for a woman artist. I wanted to know more about Georgia O’Keefe. She seemed like an interesting person. (Thinking about it now, maybe my interest in found bones came from her paintings). My first Internet search yielded zero results. Was that zero an indication of how little interest there was in art or in women artists?

I just tried the same search again now. I got over 4 and a half million results in nanoseconds. The World Wide Web is still growing up. We know it’s prodigious at storing knowledge. Let’s make it also grow wiser and more inclusive, and fill it with the stuff that matters.

From here, a humble thank you to the developers, the geeks and the net artists that have made it a good place to know.