The first time anyone spoke to me about a network that wasn't related to TV, radio, or interpersonal connections was when I was doing graphics (does anybody else remember the Apple Lisa?) for use in some U.S. Coast Guard telecommunications documents. It was a great revelation to me (and, apparently, to a goodly number of other people) that you could hook the computer in your building's machine room to one half a continent away, instead of just to one on the other side of a wall.

My first experience with the Internet goes back to a time when people talked about "ARPAnet" and spent time worrying about how long it would be before routing tables became too large to manage. After a fruitless attempt to draw a "map" of how all the various MANs and WANs were interrelated (well, it did give me a good excuse to spend my first week at a new job looking like I was actually doing something!), I graduated to trying to figure out how to get a mail message from a DECnet-only machine in Maryland to a TCP/IP-only machine in South Africa... and thence to a different DECnet-only machine in South America, with a stop somewhere in Europe for good measure!

From there, it was a quick jump to editing and expanding and re-editing a cross-reference of email routing syntaxes that would allow scientists studying supernova 1987a to "transparently" move email between SPAN, EuroSPAN, HEPnet, ARPAnet, BITNET, CSnet, and a handful of other "dear departeds" in the network world. These were the days (I was a contractor at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland) when Gophers were burrowing mammals, webs were made by spiders and names like Archie, Jughead, Veronica, and "web crawler" were found only in comic books.

During the rest of my sojourn at Goddard, I babysat (after helping set up) a menu-driven user help system to put all those email syntaxes where everyone could get to them... only to see the custom-built software equalled and then rapidly surpassed by a totally new creature called a"Gopher." (Does anybody out there remember NICOLAS?) About the same time we realized that the technology was passing us, Archie became a useful reality, followed by the early incarnations of Jughead and Veronica. Finally there appeared that fantastic tool called "Mosaic," followed shortly thereafter by Netscape's Navigator and a whole slew of "web browsers."

Of course, during this whole time, the networks themselveswere changing:

Routing tables gave way to nameservers...

The phrase "TCP/IP over everything" seemed to really catch on...

MILnet and ARPAnet went their semi-separate ways...

The venerable BITNET showed a renewed lifeforce by "swallowing" some newer nets, only to eventually fade away itself...

Vint Cerf produced his "Requieum for the ARPAnet"...

Just about everyone finally agreed that the growth in the total number of computers and users connected to the Internet was an asymptotic curve...

The U.S. National Science Foundation pulled itself out of the networking biz...

The InterNIC, with major and embarassing teething pains, moved to a new organization and new way of life...

...and after a few more spasms of mergers, takeovers, management changes, and paradigm shifts, the Internet as we know and love it (!?!?) today came into being.

So now here we are, interconnected out the wazoo on a small planet where even countries with almost no communications infrastructure have their own Internet domains. Now I don't even bother attempting to use my once-wonder-inducing, formerly-screaming-fast 2400 baud modem on my once-top-of-the-line 10mHz PC/XT clone with its text-based user interface (I often lose all patience before the boot process has completed); I head for the extra bedroom where my already-obsolete G4 Macintosh with its heavily imitated graphical interface connects me to realms only science fiction writers & their fans used to know via a device connected to the same cable that brings me the evening news. (The extra phone line is long gone, but my once-upon-a-time bleeding edge 56K modem is still sitting off to one side the way there's a high-pressure "donut" in the trunk of most cars.)

The "scroll" William Gibson wrote of in his Sprawl stories already exists, as do cyberspace and a lot of other things that used to be "just sci-fi". The vocabulary of science fiction and of the technically-knowledgeable is becoming mainstream out of the sheer weight of necessity to describe our daily lives. The kids and grandkids of my colleagues are now usually as familiar with computer technology by the time they enter grade school as I was with the telephone and typewriter at the same age... Anyone want to place bets on what they will look back at and reminisce about?