In early 1995, I discovered the Internet.
I was working for a small multimedia firm in Sydney at the time -- a crazy and fun place, where you were encouraged to run around and fish a nerf gun from the box of toys to shoot at a designer or the creative director (an environment I'd love to recreate) -- and was sent off to Apple's headquarters to take a course in HTML.
The first day of class coincided with the release of the world's first-ever WYSIWYG HTML editor, and our course, run by a bearded hippie named "Spider," was interrupted by a man showing us the box.
The web has come a hell of a long way since then. That was six years ago, and I remember the day clearly when we first saw movement on a site -- a blue Shockwave hand that would make an odd buzzing noise when you rolled over the fingers.
Roll forward to today
We're now living the future that sci-fi authors of the '60s wrote about. Just think of all that we've achieved as a collective in a short space of time; it blows my mind. Collaboration is now where it's at; online communities are breaking down geographical and temporal barriers; and people are getting together and making things happen. It's a beautiful thing, it truly, truly is.
I can only hope that we can continue along this path and rope like-minded people together to create and learn, and teach and inspire others to create and learn with them. As an independant developer, these are the things that give me a hard-on. Content is sexy; collaboration rocks my socks!
Roll forward to the future
The web is going places -- literally. No longer is it something you need to sit down in front of a computer to access. (Hell, even today that's not the case.) You have your wireless devices, your WAP phones, and your cars with embedded computer technology, just to name a few. This trend is only going to continue, and open up the web to new generations of users. And combined hardware and software advances will push developers into new areas, who, in turn, will push those same hardware and software advances further. This can only be a good thing. Information at your fingertips -- or in them?
