20 Years Ago, the Web Was Born

Happy 20th birthday, World Wide Web. Happy 30th birthday, IBM PC. Both of these foundational technologies are celebrating their big days this month.

It's hard to imagine when the Web consisted of exactly one page, but it did on Aug. 8, 1991. On that day Tim Berners-Lee wrote a placeholder page using Hypertext Mark-Up Language. Consider all that's happened on the Internet in those two short decades, and how it's turned our world upside down. Corporate empires have risen, and fallen, and others have taken their place.

You can view a copy of that first page here.

And on Aug. 12, 1981, IBM introduced its PC to compete with the Apple II and other consumer computers. Because of its stake in mainframe and midframe business computers, it was late to the game, and so elected to put together a computer using third-party vendors. That PC had a whopping 16 kilobytes of RAM, and could connect to a TV, play games and do word processing.

The decision to use third-party parts proved fateful, as it made the PC easy to clone. The cheaper clones took off in popularity, reversing Apple's dominance in personal computers but also making IBM just another player among many. One such player on the software side was a tiny startup in Seattle that had bought the rights to DOS, an operating system that would work on PCs. You may have heard of it: Microsoft.

Either of these anniversaries could rate a column, but technology waits for no one. And so the rest of my column today is devoted to updates on columns past:

I devoted a not long ago to the iPhone 5. The latest rumor sets Sept. 7 as a possible introduction date. If you can't wait until then there's always the HiPhone 5, a $33 poorly made Chinese knockoff based on supposed photos of the new iPhone.

An updated operating system for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, meanwhile, is no rumor. One thing you can expect when iOS 5 is introduced is a blossoming of myriad camera apps already out there. The new iOS will make it much easier to include even more sophisticated image manipulation within camera apps, as the functions are embedded in the OS.

I about the introduction of the Nintendo 3DS, the first gaming device to offer 3D viewing without the need for special glasses. The 3DS has failed to grab market share, primarily for two reasons: the high $249 price and no new big game title to take advantage of the 3D technology.

Last week Nintendo sought to remedy that, dropping the price to $169 and coming out with a flame-red model to go with a new game, Star Fox 64 3D. Toshiba, meanwhile, is introducing the Qosmio F755 3D, the world's first glasses-free 3D-capable laptop, for $1,700.

Earlier this summer I wrote about to “crowdsource” the identities of rioters in Vancouver, B.C., after the Canucks lost hockey's Stanley Cup championship to the Boston Bruins on June 15. In addition, social media were used to carry out a kind of vigilante justice in retaliation against some of the rioters.

The same is now at work in the wake of the recent British riots, with a website posting photos and asking for help identifying the participants, and a Google Group planning to make use of facial recognition technology for the same. Manchester police began “naming and shaming” rioters on Twitter, including their birthdates, addresses and sentences for those convicted.

I mentioned in a automation that mimics humans in social-media settings, that the use of such media is becoming more and more important in protests and political movements.

In Britain, government security officials are examining whether it is possible to prevent “suspected criminals” from sending messages through Twitter, Facebook and the Blackberry Messaging service, whose use is especially prevalent among teens in that country. Riot participants reportedly used Blackberries to coordinate and promote the violence.

In San Francisco, meanwhile, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system shut down mobile-phone service at four underground stations last week to thwart planned protests over the police killing of a transient.

In a column about as a poor man's iPad, I wrote that Amazon reportedly was developing a Kindle to compete with the Android-powered tablet. Amazon just slashed prices on the Kindle, which analysts say is a sign that new models will be introduced in September or October, including a tablet version.

And in a column on the , I wrote that MasterCard was teaming with Google to introduce “bump to pay” technology using Google Wallet. Visa just announced that it is ramping up inclusion of chips in pay terminals to support the technology, and that it will require all its transaction processors to support digital wallets by April 1, 2013.

HTC, one of the bigger smartphone manufacturers, meanwhile, is introducing its first phone including a “near field communications” chip necessary for the technology to work.

We've come a long way in the last 30 years.