ROVIN’ AND RAVIN’ WITH MIKE

THE PREHISTORY OF THE WEB

Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved

Lately, I’ve been looking for information on dinosaurs—yep, the big lizards, though they aren’t lizards anymore. But, that’s another column, which you can look forward to (?) some day under the title, "Not Your Daddy’s Dinosaurs." And, it is true that there’s not a brontosaurus in sight anymore: now, you have to ask for an apatosaurus when you want a big ol’ thunder lizard, although—oops, he’s not a lizard anymore… and neither is she!

Just to think about dinosaurs can give me a headache. Despite the movies, the comic strips (anyone else remember Ally Oop?), and the irrepressible Flintstones (from animation to Elizabeth Taylor), human beings and dinosaurs were never alive on the earth together. In fact, the most widely accepted scientific theories hold that at least sixty-five million years passed between the last of the dinosaurs and the first of the humans.

For some reason—and at the third paragraph, we finally reach the topic—the dinosaurs make me think of the World Wide Web, and not just because I’ve been rambling around the Web looking for them. Their long, slow, ponderous reign on the earth stretches so interminably, several times longer than their absence, and yet, we human beings have been burning ourselves out at both ends and in the middle, too, ever since I’ve been around—and that’s somewhat less than half a century (thank you!), just about the time it will take you to work your way through this tortuous sentence.

It was only ten years ago that the European Particle Physics Laboratory, known by the initials of its French name, CERN, proposed the World Wide Web. Now, to clear up a confusion, the WWW, as it is known to friends, is not the same as the Internet.

The Internet goes way, way back in time to the infamous Sixties, when Our President was not the only one who did not inhale. Some folks were sitting around thinking about the military preparedness of this country, even in matters of computer networking. A decade and a half later, academia weighed in with somewhat different concerns, and from this weird marriage of the military and academia, the sprawling Internet was born: that vaguely undefined network of computers that stretches around the world, making it possible for me to send e-mail to my niece in Sylvester, my niece in Seattle, and my goddaughter in Finland instantly.

Now, imagine that the Internet is Georgia, stretching from the mountains to the beaches, covering Indian mounds and one-person religious retreats, peach orchards and peanut fields. Then, the World Wide Web is a very special area of Georgia, brightly lit, swinging, wild, a little dangerous, sometimes sexy—and I can’t quit writing about Worth County, can I? (You never know what having a free-net can do for a community, do you?)

The CERNauts proposed goals of consistency, simplicity, and availability of knowledge—a great, big, swinging, lower-case in-any-case democratic w.e.b. of information, misinformation, and, it so happens, nekkid people. In fact, there is an effluvium of particle physics in the web, in the way you can bounce from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again in the click of a mouse. If you’ve had any experience with Windows or the Macintosh operating systems, you are ready for the web. And, off you go… learning and living as only the sages of CERN could ever have discerned!

If you want to listen to Enrico Caruso, learn about a medical condition so recently identified that you can’t find it in most books (reflex dystrophy syndrome), read an obituary in a newspaper published in the Florida city with the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the world, see and hear Our President talk about what is is, or be reassured that there is someone else somewhere in the world still in love with Marlene Dietrich, then, you’ll be right at home on the Web.

And, yes, I’ve done all that, and chased dinosaurs too in my long tenure on the web. Which brings me to a confession. It was not until this, the ultimate or penultimate year of the second millenium (Y2K, here we come!), ten years after the web was first proposed, that I ever logged onto a web-site, I who had been the third owner of a personal computer in our Worthwhile County, the instructor of the first computer class in Worth County, and not only a sometime columnist documenting the story and the glory of our Free-net but also a founding member of e-mail Anonymous, I searched around and found that the alleged Inca princess, the alleged Brooklyn housewife Amy Camus, inverted as Yma Sumac, was still alive and singing in her eight or so octaves.

Now, less than three weeks later, I feel that I am the duke of URLs, using the computer in my work as often as for my personal whims, chasing down old films for my Peanut.org reviews, and just generally webbing it up. But, the more I love the web, the more I see its shortcomings. The web is a one-way street, and for all that we burn up our mice, we are no more than couch potatoes clicking from channel to channel. And, once we finally log off, shut down, our virtual community is no more.

More on this will come along later. For now, since I began by ravin’ about dinosaurs, here are a couple some sites on the web to start your rovin’ and diggin’ the great lizards that ain’t no lizards no more, but most likely candidates for Colonel Sanders’s idea of glory—

www.dinosauria.com – general information;

www.dinosaurs.eb.com – Encyclopedia Britannica’s great mix of information and teaching ideas;

www.zoomdinosaurs.com—information, information, information, and lots of handouts and stuff for the ankle-biter set.

So, till next time, let me hear from you (elegantly by e-mail), and keep your feet warm (the better to rove through the web) and your heart full of noble thoughts about Yma Sumac, dinosaurs, etc.

(Teachers - click here to get Mike's Dinosours Teacher's Guide)