I can still vividly remember the early days of my computing experience back in 1994.I had a PC with Windows 3.1 Operating System and DOS 6.2. This new PC had an Intel 486DX2 CPU, and 14.4 kbps modem, which was one of the "faster" machines at that time. With this PC I soon learned about Bulletin Boards . I soon became an administrator of one board called "Insight " which one connected to via dial-up modem. The interface was strictly text based. This new technology opened up a whole new realm of computing and social networking which I would never fully understand or grasp, let alone realize how fast it would grow or how important it was until the last couple of years.
It was a very short time after that the Internet became the "buzz" which soon began to grow, expand, and now become the medium of choice today. Before long I was creating my own websites using a text editor (Windows notepad) and adding my own custom images using Windows Paint. Crude tools, but nevertheless, valuable tools in the growth of my experience in developing web content and setting up a complete website for free which I could share with friends and family.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, to share information on the internet you had to have a website. This required having a domain name, which required domain hosting, software to create the web pages, and tools to upload the content to the internet. This then created the need for knowledge on how to do all of the above, which resulted in a steep learning curve which could be rather intimidating to the average person.
Fast forward to today. Today the internet is actively used by young and old 
alike. It's in most homes via broadband. It's actively used for marketing, advertising, paying bills, reading up-to-the-minute news, share information, and more. Of all the different reasons people use the internet, social networking is the buzz today. Through social networking one can catch up on the latest news, share photos, share calender events, music, hobbies, and so much more.Through the evolution of the Internet and it's growing importance in our daily lives, one can now have a blog, a website, a domain address, an online photo album, and advertise & market products for other websites for free thru social networks and web-based tools such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Blogger, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and many others. With these readily available tools, one can setup a website, execute viral marketing & advertising for next to nothing.
Next up, I will discuss how to begin to setup your presence on the Internet.
1 comment:
Finally, someone who remembers how it was!
First experience was DOS 5.0 and I used a little program that went to the bulletin board and downloaded the forum mail and I'd read it offline.
Then came Windows 3.1 for Networking running over DOS 6.2. It was a technical feat to set all the parameters up right for the Internet.
I sometimes look back at those times with fond memories and then I remember what a pain it was to install new hardware, setting the IRQs and I/O addresses. And every change you made to the TCP/IP protocol stack required a restart.
We've come a long way.
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