The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) has been around since the early 1990s. My earliest encounter was somewhere around 1993 or 1994,
when I was working at a university research lab not far from Augsburg. There was only one browser
NCSA Mosaic and the number of web servers could be counted on one hand. When I think back to those days, I wonder why we were so excited about HTML and the World Wide Web. We had to laboriously type all three words in those days.
There was not the critical mass or current sense of importance to refer to just
the Web.
This was before the broadband revolution and the entire university had the kind of bandwidth that is common on a mobile phone these days.
Grant proposals were hurriedly rewritten to embrace the new world, and there was a real sense that the world of technology had fractured into
- before-Web and
- after-Web
periods, even if all we could do was see pictures of a coffee pot in another university not far from London.
Since then, the Web has become indistinguishable from the Internet for many users and we are long past the point of being excited about pictures of gems. Along the way, HTML has been extended, enhanced, embraced and settling into its current position as part of the indispensable technology in the daily lives of billions of people.
