This Machine is a Server...

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It's interesting to reflect that the 'internet' - as we would over-simply characterise that huge, sprawling, multi-layered, complex and nuanced network - that we all take as much for granted as we do [at least in the more privileged pockets of humanity] electricity or running clean water - almost never came into being. By which I mean the World Wide Web; those layers of software abstraction and network protocols that seamlessly enable us to suck network bandwidth in the form of cat videos and AI slop. Oh, and some useful stuff as well. Its creator, Tim Berners-Lee had a hard time convincing anyone that his idea actually had any merit at all, and if the naysayers had had their way, the notion of the Web as we know it would have been still-born there and then. But by the August of 1991, the World Wide Web had just one thousand users - all at CERN, where Berners-Lee worked, and the first ever website garnered no more than around ten visits a day. This truly was the ground being broken on the modern world's foundations, and well before the Klondike days that followed from the mid-nineties on to today. cf. Jesse Karjalainen on Medium.

We were over at Trearddur Bay for lunch this afternoon, and talking about how both my son, like me - refuses to engage any more with social media, or with pretty much anything more than text messaging, phone calls or snail-mail communications, preferring talking, postcards and letters to TikTok, FaceBook or WhatsApp, etc., and who, like me, treats the internet as both tool and library to suit our own purposes and considers constant push notification to be merely noise to be avoided. The irony in this apparently Luddite approach to tech is that he was born into a household where he was surrounded by computers and technology: the tools of my then trade, and as such, technologies that were practically unheard of, domestically at least, by the parents or children we knew from school, or even most of our friends at the time. Few had computers at home; mobile phones were analogue, rare and expensive; and the internet belonged to a small club of academics and defence experts in but a few countries and institutions: that is until Tim Berners-Lee fired up that first web page [still there thirty-five years later] back in the month of our son's birth. Nicely circular, methinks...

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