Twenty Five Years of the World Wide Web

Twenty five years ago I was studying Electrical Engineering Technology at the University of Cincinnati. Although we would later have Sun Sparcstations, in 1989 we had DEC terminals wired to a PDP-11 tucked away in some university broom closet that I used to learn Fortran and SAS. I vaguely remember one IBM RT workstation in a dusty corner. But in a distant CERN laboratory, Tim Berners-Lee was creating the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer.

Sir @TimBerners_Lee NeXT Cube computer goes on display in London http://t.co/2JQ7ZyRzHW via @CarlyPage_ via @INQ

— Dallas Marks (@DallasMarks) March 13, 2014

25 years of the World Wide Web: @timberners_lee explains how it all began http://t.co/Q6xFuhkymA @JonathanIndy via @Independent

— Dallas Marks (@DallasMarks) March 13, 2014

I asked on Twitter what everyone else was doing 25 years ago.

25 years ago today I was in engineering college but @timberners_lee invented World Wide Web on NeXT computer. What were you doing?

— Dallas Marks (@DallasMarks) March 12, 2014

Here are the responses I received.

.@DallasMarks executive #analytics for Shell, with a mainframe, Lotus 123, acetate, and a pen plotter…

— Timo Elliott (@timoelliott) March 12, 2014

@DallasMarks @timberners_lee < I was working on a team class project @UWEauClaire to develop a sys in COBOL. Who knows what that stands for?

— Patrick McCormick (@McCormickBI) March 12, 2014

@DallasMarks @timberners_lee I was three. Pretty sure I had a real important play date that day.

— Ashley Hannon #ASUG (@HannonAshley) March 12, 2014

@DallasMarks @timberners_lee It was a Sunday, so I wasn’t in school. Probably hanging around, playing with Ninja Turtle action figures.

— Craig Powers (@TheCraigPowers) March 12, 2014

And my friend Dr. Jerry Gannod weighed in on LinkedIn-

25 years ago I was working at IBM Rochester, building a prototype for an IDE running on AIX, for code that deployed to an AS/400. We were using C++ (before standardization) and X-Windows (before window-based GUIs became popular).