I remember being hugely excited about first using the JANET network when I was at college at the beginning of the 90s. I was able to send simple text messages from a computer in the Clive Sinclair Building in Cambridge to a friend at King’s College in London – and she was able to reply ‘virtually’ via a computer at her end. That was it – but it was communication like nothing else at the time.
The JANET network was one of the forerunners of the world wide web as we know it today. It has come a long way since then and with the beginning of web 3.0 (and so-called ‘semantic web’) this could be only just the start.
This is a great article celebrating 25 years of the web.
It sprang from the brain of one man, Tim Berners-Lee, and is the fastest-growing communication medium of all time. A quarter-century on, we examine how the web has transformed our lives
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/09/25-years-web-tim-berners-lee