the internet has arrived

Andy, here's a picture just for you, as requested. I'm sure ALL those other people who read this blog (I'm pretty sure that would be me, looking for typos) will enjoy it as well. (As an aside, feel free to leave comments by clicking on the link at the end of each post.)



What does this have to do with "the internet has arrived," you ask? Nothing! But pictures were requested. Ask and ye shall receive. Anyway.

I graduated from high school in 1996. At that time, the internet was around and was established enough that it was available, but not universally. Some computers had internet access, some didn't. It was considered important though not vital to understand how to use a computer, and mostly they were used as fancy typewriters, to type up essays.

When I started university that fall, for the first time everyone was permitted to have a umanitoba email account; up till then students had to apply to the IT department, and not everyone was eligible. (My first email address was umpotte0@cc.umanitoba.ca.) Internet access was readily available, but only in the computer labs and on certain terminals in various student offices. The internet was recognized as a valuable tool (as my friend Joey put it, "the best way to get porn ever") but it was still sort of a novelty, and at that time people using it extensively for anything constructive were considered early adopters. Nobody really had a handle on how to use it very effectively -- it was a totally new tool. ("Hey! Maybe I could post my lecture notes on the internet!" was a revolutionary concept, and I don't think it crossed the minds of any of my first-year profs.)

Now, of course, the internet has become indispensable, both for academics (posting lecture notes, literature searches, journal access, you name it) and for administration (registering and changing classes, checking grades and schedules, that sort of thing). And that's just in the university setting. We were talking to a travel agent the other day, and he was searching for flights, trains, and accommodations for us. It took an hour or so, but he had searched in several ways, on several airlines and rail companies, and we were pretty confident he had found us a reasonable price -- because we had also used the internet to get a sense of prices. I asked him how travel agents had functioned prior to the internet, and he just shook his head. "I don't know," he said. (He was probably younger than me.) "I guess people spent a ton of time on the phone." And probably paid a lot more because they couldn't compare prices easily. And of course, porn distribution continues to thrive. I guess you have to take the good with the slimy.

Anyway, we're now moving away from being tied to a desk to access the internet. Wireless connections, or WiFi, is becoming more and more available, both in peoples' homes and in public places. Some cities are even adopting city-wide WiFi, so that everyone has access to the internet wherever they are, whether sitting at their desk or on a public bench. I'm not saying this is easy or problem-free (security issues, for example, become more and more of a concern), but it is a marker of how important the internet has become that we are considering it in the same league as electricity and water services.

It will be interesting to see where it goes next. More and more online applications are becoming available, and often cheaper than their non-online counterparts. For example, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a word-processing and spreadsheet program similar to Microsoft Word and Excel (which pretty much everyone has some experience with) that one can use for free on the internet. It doesn't have quite as many bells and whistles as Word and Excel, but then most users don't use a lot of the bells and whistles anyway. Basically, you can create a document (such as a letter or essay) or a spreadsheet and save it on the internet. So if you create it at home and save it, you can access it at work, without having to carry a disk, CD or USB key that you might misplace or forget.

It'll be interesting to look back in a few years at this post and kind of shake my head at how much hadn't even occurred to us to try.