I get a lot of press releases in my email. And by "a lot", I mean "A LOT".

That's not a bad thing. I'm a journalist, and they're one of the tools of my trade. If I didn't get them I wouldn't get some of the ideas I use for stories and features.

However (and it's a big HOWEVER), sometimes I get press releases that are, well, annoying and wrong. They're usually trying to shoehorn something completely unrelated into an anniversary of sorts, and they're certainly trying.

Today is one of those anniversaries. It's the day that CERN has chosen to celebrate 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee persuaded his managers to give him the time and funding he needed to explore some little hypertext ideas he'd had. It's an important day for all of us who read and write on the web, as it's the foundation of everything we do.

It's a pity then that I've been receiving a string of press releases proclaiming that today is "The 20^th Birthday Of The Internet". Now that's one thing I'm pretty sure it isn't. I sent my first email message in 1984, and my first USENET message in 1987, and I'm a relative newcomer to the nets.

If we're going to have a birthday for the Internet, it's got to be October 1^st 1969, when the first two routers were finally in place, one at UCLA and the other at Stanford. This year is not the Internet's 20^th birthday, it is its 40^th.

So, as an educational tool, here are some historical photographs:

This is a BBN Interface Message Processor. It was one of the first routers, that hooked up the first few sites on the ARPANET, the predecessor to today's Internet.



It is substantially older than this NeXT Cube, which was Tim Berners-Lee's machine at CERN. It's the machine that ran the first web server, which itself was built on protocols that evolved from those used by the IMP.



Still, Happy Birthday Web!

A 1927 navigation device. Scroll the map through the viewer to guide you on any of 20 or so pre-set routes.

Yes, I know, it's a link to the Daily Mail. And from a Guardianista like me, too. Sorry...

Cat on the Colosseum



Cat in the Forum

It's about time to cross the streams, and merge three recurring interests across my friends list: ancient history, travel and cats. So here are a couple of old photos that I recently added to Flickr, of some of Rome's famous feral cats lazing about on some of Rome's most famous ruins...

Rome, Italy
September 2000

Here's a link to a scan of Bryan Talbot's short history of the British comic, originally published in the Guardian's Guide supplement.

Of course, if you want a longer history of the form (with a lot more thrown in besides), you couldn't do much worse than read Bryan's Alice In Sunderland...

Yes, there is still a Veronica^*, Santa Claus^**...

...which means there are still people using Gopher! There also appear to be a bunch of Jughead servers out there, too.

Now, I wonder what happened to WAIS?

^*I suspect the link will only work in Mozilla browsers, as they're pretty much the only ones that still support the gopher:// protocol.

^**And yes, I know the original quote was “Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus”...

According to this (and other) news articles it appears that Sky is looking at buying Easynet, who bought UK Online, the national ISP I helped start in an old brewery in Shepton Mallet.

The chain goes on.

I wonder if the ducks are still there...