By the early 1990's, people were using computers in many different ways. Computers were already installed in
most schools, offices, and homes. They were commonly used for writing papers, playing games, financial
accounting, and business productivity applications. But very few people used them for communication,
research, and shopping the way we do now. A man named Tim Berners-Lee changed all that. In 1990, Lee
added an exciting hypertext and multimedia layer to the Internet and called it the World Wide Web. The rest, as
they say, is history.
Believe it or not, the Web was not the first attempt at building a worldwide online community. Cutting edge
geeks have been using online services such as Compuserve all the way back to the early 1980's. There were
thousands of other privately run Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) as well, which served the general interest of
curious nerds and researchers from around the world. Perhaps the most ambitious project was the French system
Minitel, but it never caught on in the rest of the world and eventually faded into obscurity. Experiences on these
BBS was poor by today's standards. There was no graphics or even color. There was no sound except of course
the obnoxious beeps and gurgles a modem makes when it it initiates a dial-up connection to a server. Bandwidth
was also very slow compared to today's speeds. Typical operating speeds were between 300 and 1200 baud.
Today, a typical broadband connection is thousands of times faster than this.