One Hundred Years of Solipsism
By Michael Swaine
Gazing backward over the years from our bright vantage point at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it's difficult to clearly make out the early history of the Web, back in the shadows of the early 1900s. Images strobe into memory like glimpses of a battlefield at night lit by bomb blasts. Only quieter, of course. The invention of Usenet, WAIS, Gopher, and the rest of the remarkable stream of innovations that flowed, like champagne at a B2B IPO, from Thomas Edison's remarkable workshop. The courage of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders stringing fiberoptic cable through the jungles of Panama, and later, East L.A. The formation of the League of Nations and the tricky negotiations over the precise wording of the GNU Public License.
It was a turbulent century, with two World Wars and that whole Melissa virus thing. Yet even during war, progress continued, sometimes in the most unlikely places. World War I may have been raging across Europe, but in a secret laboratory high in the Swiss Alps, a brave scientist toiled ceaselessly on an all-black computer, striving to perfect the invention that would change the course of history. A history that would forever immortalize Tim Berners-Lee and his amazing HTTP protocol. After the war, progress was rapid and the untrammeled spirit of the time seemed to recognize no bounds. The Roaring Twenties ushered in the mixed blessings of bathtub gin and JavaScript, billion-dollar venture capital seed funding of Web-monitored soft-drink machines. Gangsters and their gun molls, their gangsta rap, and their insidious single-pixel GIF tricks.
