Back In The Day

Melissa St. John - March 31, 2005 - TownHall.com

In 1993 America Online had just launched its Windows platform and gone public on NASDAQ at $11.50 a share. Nobody surfed the web - Microsoft Internet Explorer didn't even exist. Do you remember when people talked about the mysterious "Information Superhighway"? And here we were creating a "Graphical User Interface" (GUI) for internet message boards that only MIT students were using with any frequency. It was a crazy idea!

It was not too long ago that any letter to the editor was filtered through the politcally correct thinking of people who were far to the left of mainstream Americans. Then the Internet allowed for small news sites that could provide information that was not filtered, and when you sent a "letter to the editor" in disagreement or agreement (by posting on a message board), it would not be edited to reflect the views of the editor.

This was the start of Internet News Sites. Over a quarter of all Americans now get their news from the Internet. Until I read this article, I did not know that a local lady from Raleigh was one of the three people who helped to launch this revolution that has become such a technological and cultural phenomenon.

For those who do not remember the Internet before the World Wide Web existed, I can only explain that to do anything in those days was 20 times harder and more time consuming that it became a few years later, and 100 times harder than today. To visualize what the Internet could become and act on it at that time is still impressive, even to those of us who shortly joined the revolution.

I am always amazed at how fast history goes in the world of technology. We are talking about only 12 years ago. And yet it is 4 generations ago in the technology we use to build web portal systems today. Today it is easy. Then, it was amazing that anyone could forsee the value, much less master the process. No one had ever done it before.

Read this article ... and while you are doing it remember that the revolution in news coverage these people started is still changing our world. (Ask Dan Rather!) TownHall was the pioneer in Internet news ... and they are still the best news site on the Internet.