The On-Line Phenomenon – Pulling Dollars from Cybersapce
Self confessed nethead, Roderick Eime , reminisces on the birth of the ‘net and examines pitfalls its flourishing future. It wasn’t that long ago when the Internet was derided as an esoteric plaything for geeks, nerds and the socially incompetent. I remember extolling the virtues of email to my friends and clients in the early ‘90s and triumphantly displaying my first web page in 1994. Some immediately saw the possibilities while many others, even the majority I must say, had to be dragged screaming to the computer. Now, over a decade later, it’s hard to imagine life without a tollpass for the Information Superhighway. We all remember the first “clunky” web pages full of flashing text and naff rotating graphics. Now the art and science of web design is as much about the back-end architecture as it is the slick graphics. Web implementation, search engine optimisation and data streaming is now driven by near incomprehensible protocols like PHP Hypertext Preprocessors, Perl CGI Common