Like any technology, if you aren't in the industry, you don't generally know about. That's how it is with the internet and email with regards to their age. Until it became mainstream, very few people knew it even existed. I remember when my middle school received computers and internet in the library. The only net filter they had was a teacher watching everybody to make sure they were actually doing work.
Now schools and colleges are blocking porn and bi torrent traffic; Although why they group those two together I'm not sure of. I got my first email account in 1999 because a teacher had some extra reading not covered in class and it was easier just to send it. 2000 my grandparents had internet installed for me at their house. It was called ZebraNet (?) and it was run by a lady that also cut hair. (That's a small town for you lol.) She would have to connect before I got home or it would 6pm before you had a hope of getting online. Now I'm sitting in my room, at the other end of the house, with broadband wireless.
Even with my mechanically savy self, the progression of internet and technology in general has grown too fast for me to keep up with it. I generally don't know about something new unless my best friend ( who is heavily into IT) tells me about it. He generally gets the 'uh-huh that's nice' comment unless I find it really interesting. In that case I'll wait a year or two to get the previous model (which works just fine) bone cheap.
My best friend will be surfing the net and checking email and FB on his phone and I'm just amazed it could do so much. So I went on ebay and got a smart phone that was a few models back ($44.) I'm ranting about all it can do and my friends look at me weird because they had one years ago. I didn't get internet because it was 30 a month extra and I'm stingy.
I didn't know one person is credited with being the father of the internet. That part had a wow factor of 20 on a scale of 10. I thought hordes of programmers across the world just worked on it in bits and pieces and joined it all up one day. One guy was credited with email and it's amazing that one person has the intellect to come up with something that revolutionary. I also didn't know that the web and internet were separate. I started to think about the web and internet as different types of apples; Romes and Red Delicious are both red apples but one is much better for baking and the other is better for eating.
I don't I've ever heard of Gopher before this class, although I had used FTP and Telnet regularly in my tech school training. We learned how to connect our computers together and look on a computer that across the room to access a file. We learned how to Norton Ghost one copy of software across the entire computer lab. I'm not sure for anybody else in this class but a lot of the computer history that we discussed in this class I personally experienced. Hearing something you used to do on a regular basis now referred to as History, is an easy way of making somebody just 27 feel quite old.
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