20 years in one post

Blogs, wikis, feeds, widgets, templates, podcasts, tabs. How long have these words been around? I remember my father, back in 1985, bringing home his brand new 'toy', an Apple II computer. No hard disk, huge 5 1/4 floppy disks, black and white screen, an incredibly noisy printer. It's still in his house, on its way to becoming an antique piece displayed for everyone to see, like his collection of old 78rpm records and my mother's china.

Then, in the mid-90s, my first "internet" connection. It took me hours to upload a page - I could type the url (url?) and go downstairs to have lunch, there was plenty of time. Today I go crazy if the page doesn't appear immediately on my screen... I had problems sending e-mails. The first one, of course, was that none of my friends had e-mail, so basically I couldn't write to anyone. Except for my friend in the US; her Compuserve address was a weird sequence of letters and numbers that I would never ever memorize, and that made me feel like I was sending an intergalactic message to an alien. Of course, now I have at least three different e-mail accounts, and I'm absolutely astonished when I hear someone admit "no, I don't have an e-mail address". Now, THAT's an alien!!!

And then dial-up connection was not enough. Today I need to watch videos, I want to talk to people in real time, pages are too heavy for 56k (I never thought a page could be heavy, but again, pages used to be made of paper...). So I got high speed internet connection. Not exactly Schumacher-speed, but fast enough for my immediate needs.

Now, thanks to the EVO (Electronic Village Online) sessions, I've been spending most of my (limited) free time blogging, wikiing, feeding, podcasting and widgeting. And this is just the beginning. My father would have liked to see what's going on in the cyberworld. It's hard to imagine that it all started with a 'jurassic' Apple II...