Today’s Science Week Question is an easy one “Which invention has helped you most with your working life?”. Of course it is the internet. The highlights of my history with it are as follows:
- 1990: Learned it existed when I started Masters in UCD
- 1991: Figured out email, Usenet news, Gopher. Discovered ftp.funet.fi and the world of shareware
- 1992: First job in S3. Email only. Figured out ftpmail to download programs overnight on 14.4k modem
- 1994: Found out about the web. Used Mosaic for the first time
- 1995: Discovered Free software, FSF, GPL, Open Source OS called RTEMS and GCC.Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Lycos
- 1996-2000: Web developed and so did I. Online purchasing, Google, Yahoo mail, IOL, indigo, eircom.net, ISDN, Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Geocities, homepages, animated gifs
- 2001-2003: Startup with ISDN only. Discovered SEO, dmoz, blogging, RSS
- 2003-now: Live it and breath it 16 hours a day. DSL, mobile, ATOM, Reviews, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Social Networking, IM, Skype, Firefox, Widgets, Flash
The greatest invention in my lifetime and my job would not exist without it.
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