As a few of you know, I was one of the kids from my generation who was messing with the first incarnations of a home computer. My first computer was the Vic-20. I think I bought it for $75 with the Vic-20, tape drive, and 300 baud modem. The Vic-20 was made by Commodore and had a minuscule amount of memory but, was really a fun computer for a 6th grader. I remember loggin on to Bulletin boards, making games in Basic, and enjoying the heck out of the little computer. It was about the end 1994 when the internet made it’s stamp on our society. Netscape released a browser and 14,400 modems were cutting edge. For me, cutting edge was a Power Macintosh 7100/80 A/V with a 14,400 modem.
I remember the first incarnations of Netscape and the first sites to get published. Life on the web was pretty mundane but, evolution persisted. I recently checked out a site recently called Internet Archive. I checked it out due to my curiosity of the differences in www.whitehouse.gov from circa 1999 with Bill and Al to W and Dick in 2004 to Barrack and Joe in 2009. Wow! What a road of change our ol’whitehouse.gov has gone through. I’ve even heard that the last election would have been significantly different if the internet and youtube didn’t play such a huge role in getting out the message.
Whatever your persuassion or political alignment I think we need to realize that change is inevitable. The lawmakers of the world certainly impact us in our growth, family values, and financial well being but, as with life we march on. Hopefully we’ll look back 10 years from now and realize that we’ve come a long way. I believe progress is inevitable. It may not change at the pace we want or change in the direction we want but, it will certainly change.
P.S.
I’m not sure of many of you caught the online town hall meeting today but, it was pretty cool. I’m a big believer in streaming content and it’s pretty exciting to me to see it embraced by the president’s office. From what I hear Macon Phillips is the man bringing this to reality. I must give him some serious kudos for the development, implementation, and production of this new medium for the white house. Anyone want to take a guess on how much online content we’ll see from this administration?
