How I Invented the Internet

Okay, I didn't. But neither did Al Gore, who for some odd reason seems to be getting all the credit for it. So, why shouldn't I? He has also invented the global warming, although in this case he is trying to give the credit to all of us. Yeah, how generous of him, but I am not taking it. Keep it, sir. You deserve it. And if you want to blame it on your fellow men, don't also forget your fellow cows. Yeah, they are apparently also behind this thing. (See my site for more appalling details...) I have suspected it for a long time. I mean, how else can you explain their coolness? Now I am finally getting it. I must say they have been really good at it. Never trust a cow!

Man, will I ever stop sidetracking?! Cows and the Internet... I have heard about dogs on the Internet, like in "on the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog," but cows?! I am serious: I am getting help tomorrow...

Okay, so now that you caught me lying about it, I need to do some explaining. But please don't apply for a detective job at your local police station yet, because I basically told you that. Which does not necessarily make you a brilliant detective, but rather it makes me a really lousy liar...

Okay... Let me now sidetrack from sidetracking which will probably put me on the right track again. Or finally. That of explaining my egregious lie. What do I have to excuse for it? I do have a bit, I must say.

Namely, while I have already admitted that I had not invented it, I did discover it much sooner than most people out there. And since "to discover" is so often confused with "to invent..." Well, who am I kidding? Obviously, I did not confuse anything. Yes, your honor, I am a stinking liar, but let me continue nevertheless.

In particular, I discovered the WWW sooner than 99.99999...% of other mortals, including the proud cow owners that, obviously, deserve to be mentioned separately.

While these days the World Wide Web is almost synonymous with the Internet, it was not always like that. The WWW was connected to the Internet in the summer of 1991. At that time, the latter had already been around for two decades or so. I was first exposed to the Internet in the spring of 1991. It was through email which even these days is still the most popular form of the Internet.

I was then a physics grad student at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. In those days email was such a novelty that you could brag about using it. You would say, "Hey, I got an email yesterday," and the fellow you mentioned this to would go green with envy and a few hours later would jump out of a window in his windowless apartment creating a brand new window in the process of jumping out of it. That's why there are no windowless apartments in Poland anymore. I put an end to them. Single handedly. Some people would go postal after I mentioned using email to them. The most dedicated (or crazy) of them would travel long hours by train to the nearest post office where no one had gone postal before. There would be riots in the streets on the days I mentioned receiving email to more than three people.

Yes, the beginnings of the Internet in Poland were definitely more turbulent than most historians acknowledge these days. But then again, my account of it is much less politically correct.

I discovered the WWW as early as 1992. I believe it was in February or March and I learned about it from the most recent issue of Physics World, a British physics monthly, that I could get my hands on. After reading about it, I opened a telnet connection to it and there it was! Already incredibly rich and very potent, but, obviously, not nearly as rich and impressive as it is today.

At that time the Web was a very local affair. For two reasons. As limited mostly to physicists, the overwhelming majority of whom still had no clue that it even existed and local to Europe, having been invented in CERN, a European center for high energy physics in Geneva.

I immediately recognized how great this thing was to become and wanted to learn as much as possible about it. I contacted someone on the team that worked on the WWW development. I still remember his first name: Jean Pierre. I remember it well because in my first few emails to him I would address him simply as "Jean." It took me a few days to realize that his was one of those double French names like Jean Paul or Jean Marie. Heck, they may even have names like Jean Jean, Paul Paul, Pierre Pierre, Marie Marie, or perhaps even Pierre Pierre Pierre Pierre, but since I have really not checked this, please don't quote me on it. I am really good at sidetracking not double checking.

When I finally figured out that his first name was probably Jean Pierre, I asked him if it was so. "Yes," came a reply. A very relieved reply because, as Jean Pierre told me, he had thought that his email had been getting through to me incorrectly.

Apparently, those days people were still being concerned that email could drop every other word in the message. Like in "Are you really sure that this will get through all and not just half of it? And what if it drops every other word? Should I send two copies of it? Do you think that two copies is better? Or maybe three? Okay, I am sending five. Man, I won't be able to fall asleep tonight, for sure!"

It turned out that Jean Pierre and I had a mutual acquaintance who was working in my physics department in Cracow. Yes, in some circles the world was small even before the WWW. But what was truly remarkable is that those days you could correspond with someone on the WWW development team and this fellow would even like to know what you thought about the Web and how you would like to see it developed.

Imagine these days getting an email from a guy like that asking you what you think about the Web. I bet that your first reaction would be: "Help! This guy is nuts! He wants to know what I think about the Web? How crazy is that?!"

The same year I discovered the WWW, only a few months later, I came to America to complete my doctoral studies. At that time, the Internet in the US was still predominantly concentrated around Academia, being organized into gophers. You could connect to them via telnet or FTP. The Web was practically unknown, even at universities, with the first web text browser, Lynx, yet to appear. When it finally did, the Web popularity greatly increased. It was also then that I rediscovered the Web in the New World.

The first popular, although mostly in Academia, graphical browser, Mosaic, was not good enough to compete with Lynx. Even on fast university lines, it was slow like molasses. It was only Netscape, the first commercial graphical browser, developed largely by the same team which had developed Mosaic, that launched the Web explosion. It was 1995 and it was now obvious that the Web was unstoppable. And yet, curiously enough, I was still getting emails from people outside Academia asking me what the big deal about the WWW was. Or why was everyone talking about it?

It was also in 1995, and in the same month in which the Yahoo! boys appeared on the Web scene, that I created my first site, called Waldemar's List. The name was not my idea. It came from abroad, from a Canadian fellow, Allen. It was together with him that I started working on this site, although the site idea was mine. It was the directory of sites dedicated to futures and futures trading.

The beach was completely empty then. A site that everyone now knows as Yahoo! could have been launched by virtually anyone. My site, a highly specialized directory dedicated to trading rather esoteric financial instruments, was then considered a major financial directory and oftentimes listed among top ten investing directories along with Yahoo! that was a directory for everything.

My collaboration with Allen was going on smoothly and I was pleased with it. Allen was responsible mostly for the graphical aspect of the site while I was taking care of collecting links and organizing them. At some point, however, Allen got frustrated by some changes I had made to his graphics and refused to participate in any further work. What's even worse, he hijacked the site files and made it unavailable to the public.

I don't know what made him so mad. Why making changes was so unacceptable to him? And those were small changes, nothing major at all. After all, if one is to believe some French saying, only cows do not change their mind. Hmm... Cows and the French connection. What did I tell you about cows before? Didn't I tell you that they should not be trusted? See... Was I ever wrong?

His reaction was totally out of proportion and even though he finally came back to his senses, I decided to continue working on Waldemar's List entirely on my own. I did not use his graphics, but designed my own. That's how what was probably the first American-Canadian web collaboration that lasted over a year ended up on the rocks. I was saddened by it hoping to continue our work for much longer, but nothing lasts forever.

And neither did my site. I continued working on it for a few more years, but was getting more and more bored with it and finally took it down in the summer of 2002. After over 7 years of web presence, my first site became history. I now think that it was a premature decision, but I came to this realization only a few years later.

In 1995 you could still know well all the interesting or useful sites you had ever bookmarked. A year later that was becoming more and more wishful thinking. In the computer lab I used to hang out in those days, I would hear people say that they could not keep up with the Web growth anymore. At that time, I still could, but a year or so later I too gave up. These days, I don't even try to. I am happy if I am able to manage my bookmarks in a reasonably efficient manner.

The growth of the Web in the 90-ties was phenomenal or rather phenomenally explosive. And it continues to grow. There are now over 100 million sites out there.

The Web of the 21st century is being increasingly shaped by the paradigm of Web 2.0. However, there is hardly anything in Web 2.0 that would not have been known to the users of Web 1.0. The core technologies of Web 2.0 were largely developed and already used in the era of Web 1.0, the only major differences being in the intensity of their application and in their "mashing" which is a newfangled word meaning the same as "convergence" and which can truly be attributed to Web 2.0. All that was, however, largely possible in the 90-ties, except that the bandwidth was still too limited for these technologies to converge and become as ubiquitous as they are becoming now, in the era of Web 2.0.

And that is how, dear children, I have invented this Internet thing.

"Liar!"

While I really do not insist that you believe that I invented the Internet, I do insist that you visit the Eclectic section of my site (http://www.eminimethods.com/Eclectic.html) for more stories like that...

Waldemar Puszkarz, Ph.D., is a web veteran with 15 years of web surfing under his belt. By training, he is a theoretical physicist, but his interests are much broader than science and include trading financial markets, sports betting, poker, and researching online business opportunities. He is also an avid book reader and sports afficionado. Currently he is making his living mostly as a day trader. He has been in the trading trenches for almost a decade during which he has traded a variety of financial instruments. He is the owner and webmaster of Eminimethods.com (http://www.eminimethods.com) which provides free common sense trading education and simple trading systems for e-mini and stock markets as well as reviews of honest online business opportunities in Meet HOBO (http://www.eminimethods.com/HOBO.html) section of his site.