World Wide Web

I love history! So let us start with a little history about the World Wide Web. I was fortunate enough to be able to work at a company that developed the first commercial version of the UNIX Operating System. They were founded in 1977 and I joined them ten years later. UNIX is an Operating System (the thing you need to make your computer do something) that was intended to run on minicomputers (although they were called that, they could not fit into your apartment and required air-cooling). These computers were typically used as an isolated system that had quite a number of text-based terminals attached to them.

Today UNIX lives on, and forms the basis of Linux, Solaris, MacOS, and others. Our company spotted an opportunity to add products that would add features and technologies that today are standard. Some of these examples are email (ability to send a mail to a person on another computer), and ftp (ability to transfer a file to another computer, or to just access another computer). Yes, you had to pay extra if you wanted to be able to send mail. Thanks to the Internet, all of this was made possible.