At least DXM and I are in the same boat and rowing.

PM, you must be super-special. Are your accounts POP or IMAP?

Anyone heard of this?

Opening a booth in the vast electronic mall known as the World Wide Web is fast becoming one of the hippest ways to reach customers and constituents, to judge by the actions of a growing cadre of businesses, government agencies, universities, and other organizations. The newest segment of the global Internet, the Web lets users wander by clicks of a computer mouse among thousands of custom-designed multimedia documents stored in linked computers.

....

After starting up a system to browse for Web pages, a user could find and read the text and then retrieve the graphic by clicking on the "link" to it (the link, in the form of a word, phrase, or icon, would be highlighted). The user might wish to correspond about the information with the original team, or might develop additional Web documents -- which could also take the form of color photographs, sound, and animation -- that perhaps could be linked to the original text page by the same highlighting process.

The creation of Mosaic, a program that with colorful, "windows"-style graphics makes browsing easy and enjoyable, has fueled an explosion in Web use and development far beyond that envisioned by the original scientists. The public is starting to use the system to find documents posted by businesses and other organizations describing, say, how to order flower bouquets electronically or apply for admission to a particular university.

OK, that's from an article published in Technology Review ten years ago. Interesting and fun (for me, anyway) jog down memory lane.

A year before this article, I bought my first book on the internet - it described the Web as an experimental technology. However, I could not find internet access in Minneapolis at that time.

an explosion in Web use and development far beyond that envisioned by the original scientists

Porn.

I mean I wonder if any of the devisers went "Oh! Extra naked ladies! I'm pulling an all nighter on this protocol!"

I was on the Internet in 1987.

The Internet is for porn.

Why you think the 'net was born?

Porn, porn, porn.

So was I. I just didn't realise it had a name. I didn't make it onto the web until '95, I think.

edit: ON THE INTERNET not born for porn. Sheesh.

Back then, all the porn was in ASCII art. Or if you were really lucky, you could get some monochrome bitmap pictures.

Lets see.... I sent my first internet email in '91. I went to my first web site in '94. I was in Minneapolis, dialed in to a server in San Francisco (in terminal mode) and browsing the web via a text browser. IIRC, I liked the Web better than ftp, Archie or Veronica (the latter two are/were also internet protocols).

I sent my first internet email in '91. I went to my first web site in '94.

That sounds like more or less my timeline too.

I sent my first Internet e-mail in 1982.

Latecoming freaks.