Part 2 of Where am I, how did I get here, why am I here?

In 1976, the modern world started! The Apple I came into being as a kit. It actually had a keyboard and could be hooked to a TV. It was black and white only. By 1977, it had evolved into the Apple II, with color! At the same time there were some other microcomputers available, primarily the trash 80 (sorry, TRS-80 from Tandy-Radio Shack) and the Commodore Pet. As an Apple owner, I didnt think those were worth anything! And then in 1978, another break through, Apple came out with a disk drive! That was when I got involved by borrowing money from my father-in-law to get my own! By 1981, IBM jumped into the fray along with a relatively new company, Microsoft to come out with the first IBM PC. And still no commercially available access to the world wide web.

In 1992 (only 14 years ago), the first commercial access to the world wide web was started, Delphi. It offered internet mail, FTP (file transfer protocol), newsgroups, telnet, and Gopher. These were all primarily text based retrieval and storage methods. In early 1993, I got online for the first time ever! But you had to know where data was, how it was stored, and then you could retrieve it very slowly over dial up lines through exceedingly slow modems. I only stayed with it for about a year and then abandoned it as not meeting my needs.

It was not until 1995 that Compuserve came up with WWW access through a product called Spry Mosaic although they had been an internet provider and/or online service since 1969. At around the same time, America Online (AOL) was starting to offer direct WWW access though they had started up around 1985. AOL offered their first Windows based product in 1996. 1996 was also the year that Google started up though they didnt become Google.com until 1998. Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) started in 1994 and incorporated in 1995. It seems to me that true WWW strength can be dated to about this time, which means that we enjoy the fruits of something that is only about 10 years old in its current manifestation. And on top of that, Xbox Live didnt start up until November, 2002. That is less than 4 years ago!!!

Bottom line that is how we got to where we are! The why is yet to come (hopefully).