MIT’s Technology Review recently reprinted an article from April 1995 describing the then-emerging World Wide Web, just to remind us all how new the phenomenon is to our hectic world. A mere decade ago, technology students were drafting their first home pages, a few companies were sticking a big toe into this new idea for on-line communications, and a handful of starry-eyed reporters were starting to ramp up their utopian hyperbole about the new age of equality and opportunity.
When the article was written, there were about 10,000 web servers in operation (the Internet-connected computers that hold web content). Just for a little scale, this month a web statistics site found 62,286,451 servers on-line, a gain of 1.7 million servers from just one month before (a million new servers a month is fairly routine these days).
This is not to be all gee whiz about the growth of the web protocol (although, it is pretty gee whiz), but more to remind us all how young this particular form of communication is. It may be pervasive now, but only a decade ago, the web was the realm of geeks. So if anyone at a conference or in a consultancy tells you they know where the web is right now, and where it’s going next, you can be sure about one thing: they are wrong.
