30 years ago, one decision altered the course of our connected world

I had access to the early internet prior to the web, when I attended university.

After graduating, I started to subscribe to the online service Delphi which in the USA was similar to CompuServe or AOL. But at the time, Delphi was the only such service to provide a gateway to the Internet. It was mostly useful for FTP and NNTP. Within a year or so, the the web became the focus. Still entirely text based, but so obviously the way forward.

The Web might have changed the average person’s world but there were a whole lot of things that occurred first started with the Net itself. Gopher, Kermit, Usenet, … the pieces were there for a hacker with an itch to scratch and an idea to deliver. Opening up the internet and Usenet made the hacker world explode.