Forty Years of the Internet—Maybe

No one can agree on a specific date when the Internet truly began. Some believe that its birth occurred forty years ago, but you don’t have to be an expert in the subject to know that the various aspects that make up the Internet were invented at different times to make it what it is today. Now it is a life line of communication throughout the world; many teachers use the Internet to assign homework and reading materials to their students, businesses rely on it for communications and other work-related tasks, and many people like me use it for just about everything. I can remember a time when I didn’t have a computer, or even an email address. My communications consisted of phone calls and letters exclusively. Now I have to sift through my teeming inboxes of several email accounts to find non-spam correspondence. I don’t have rose-colored glasses when I think about time before the Internet was a well-known household term, but I do know that I had less of a tendency to stay home for extended periods of time back then. Information is at our fingertips, and that is great, but we all know that too much of a good thing can have opposite effects sometimes.

This Labor Day, and just after the unofficial 40^th anniversary of the Internet, I find myself respecting the technology and the people behind it (too numerous to count) who created this virtual medium that has truly contributed to the world of communication and globalization. There really is no going back, and I look forward to the future of the online communications and technology.