by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
I am old enough to remember what life was like prior to the commercial use of the Internet, and the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) which made the Internet graphical and interactive, rather than just text-based.
My first access to the Internet came in the early 1990s, when I was working as an English professor at a University in Saudi Arabia. The university’s computer network ran on Unix, and was connected to other academic networks around the world on a network called “Bitnet” at that time.
The Internet was just getting started in academic circles, whereas previous to that the Internet was primarily only used by the military.
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The Internet is originally a product of the U.S. DoD and ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), developed in the late 1950s and 1960s.
This was the Cold War period, and the idea was that if the U.S. had a distributed network of “nodes” that were all interconnected, then having one part of the network attacked or bombed would not take down the entire network.
I taught myself Unix and learned how to use the Bitnet network that my university was using to connect to the Internet, which was rapidly being expanded in the area of academics at that time and starting to replace the older network systems, such as Bitnet. I primarily used the Listserv function to join discussion groups with people around the world on various topics that I could not otherwise research while living in Saudi Arabia.
I clearly remember the day where I learned how to use “Telnet“, which allowed me to literally log in to another computer half way around the world, and view that computer’s file structure, and even open and read files.
It didn’t have much practical use since the files were all technical files on various computer topics, but just being on another computer in another part of the world in REAL time, was fascinating, and intoxicating.
I knew then that this technology was going to change the world and how we communicate and share data.
When my contract at the university ended in 1995, the World Wide Web was just getting going, but at that time it was not allowed in Saudi Arabia.
So my family and I returned to the U.S., as I feared that the technology was developing too rapidly for me to stay in Saudi Arabia, and that I would miss out on this new, emerging technology that was rapidly transforming society, and was based in the U.S.
I passed up an opportunity to advance in my own career in CAEL (Computer Assisted English Learning), as a colleague of mine in Saudi Arabia had connections with a very wealthy Sheikh in another Arab Gulf country who wanted to hire me to develop computer English courses.
I switched from teaching English to teaching the technology, and the hot ticket in 1995 in the U.S. was Microsoft’s first truly 32-bit operating system that finally could compete with Apple’s OS, “Windows 95”.
In the mid to late 1990s I became certified to train people and schools in the new Microsoft networking suite of products which were in high demand. The pay was great, and the demand to learn these new products was quickly exceeding the trainers needed to train people on them, and I soon had my own company where I recruited my best students to become trainers also.
Y2K
Then came the awareness in the late 1990s that a simple date code on computers could threaten to take down all of this new technology that our society was rapidly becoming dependent upon.
The issue was that many computers only used two digits for the year (e.g. 1/1/97 for January 1, 1997.), the last two digits. So 1998 was 98, 1999 was 99, etc.
But what was going to happen in the year 2000, where the last two digits would be 00? Would the computers interpret that as 1900, and if so, what was going to happen?
Nobody really knew, but the results could have been catastrophic, because our society had become so dependent upon the technology in such a short period of time.
As I began to investigate the Y2K problem, I began to learn just how fragile our society had become by rapidly adopting the technology. Supply chains, for example, were developed on JIT (just in time) inventory to reduce costs and overhead, and I quickly saw that it would not take much to bring down the whole system through a rapidly cascading series of problems in the technology.
And at this point, the commercial use of the Internet by consumers through the Web was just getting started, and not even a factor yet.
It was the business, government, and academic sectors that had the most exposure to computer failures.
Our family decided to just move to the Philippines in 1998 and ride out Y2K there, as we moved to a rural location that was agriculturally based and had very little technology. This was the area where my then-wife had grown up, and although the area had electricity, it was frequently down and the people knew how to get along with major disruptions to the grid.
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