Wednesday, May 30, 2007

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DQ reader Rob sent in two very interesting comments about posts I made last week:

About "Information"; I've been at my current IT job at a hospital in Chicago for 17.5 years. We've been on the internet from when it was new and the general public had no idea what it was. I'm talking using GOPHER. EARLY internet. When the WWW started, we would go to a site at UofI-Champaign, and they would have a page that listed ALL THE NEW PAGES THAT DAY. There were maybe 30-50 and we couldn't believe how much it grew every day! We went to a webpage that was from the University of Krakow math department. I can't describe how cool that was. My "where were you when" moment of it all was when I went to an FTP site in New Zealand and downloaded a 1meg file over a satelite link, which they asked us not to do because it cost them a bunch of money. At that moment, I realized truly how small the world had become; I could get information from ANYWHERE at ANYTIME. It was an amazing moment.

About the Cicadas... When I was 8 in 1973, my grandparents lived in a town west of Chicago called Villa Park. It was an older post WW2 town, but had a lot of old-growth trees. When the cicadas came out, it was like a moving carpet on the trees and lawn. You couldn't see the bark or grass through the complete coverage of red-eyed bugs... The worst part was the sound; in the evening you couldn't hold a conversation outside.

That's one of the coolest anecdotes I've heard in a long time--seeing a list of ALL new pages on the Internet each day, and being blown away that there were fifty!

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