Hey there, it’s me again. Welcome to part 50 of my 1,000 part series called Computers! Are they the future? Or Are they soul-sucking death boxes sent to us by Cthulhu?
I’m Jake Roper and I just installed the internet on my computer, so today I’m going
to take you on a journey through the world wide web.
It’s a magical new invention that is connecting computers all over the world.
You might be saying, Jake what is this crazy thing. I’m a hip guy, and I like to keep up to date with the cool latest popular slang
For that I can use inthe90s.com, which is right now (not)! You'll get that later.
But who invented the Web?
A man named Tim Berners-Lee, an English engineer and computer scientist who was just trying
to find a way for scientists around the world to share data.
And he did just that in 1989 but it wasn’t until August 6, 1991 when the first site was
actually launched.
This is it and it outlines how to make more web pages.
So thanks Tim Berners-Lee for this page, inthe90s.com and other awesome DOTWWWNG, Things you can
Do On The World Wide Web Now Guys.
Okay before we can get cruising on the net the first thing we have to do is
onto the internet.
This is going to take a while.
Finally!
Now we’ll load a web browser that will help us go wherever we want to!
Of course the only web browser that matters in 1995 is Netscape Navigator, and through
that we can access our search engine.
The oldest search engine still in use is Webcrawler.
It’s almost 2 years old right now in 1995.
Alright, now we can log onto our geocities page.
Just enter a URL, that stands for Uniform Resource Locator by the way, and you’ll have a brand
new geocities webpage all to yourself. Look at that! Pretty hip.
To see web pages over time, the wayback machine is a good resource.
You can even look into the future, all the way to 2018! Wow! Where's the flying cars right?
That seems like a pretty arbitrary time to stop reading the future but what do I know? I'm just a kid sitting in his mom's basement.
This site has over 279 billion web pages??
That can’t be right.
There are less than 30,000 websites right now in 1995.
Whoa that is some cool internet. Here’s a weird one from 2005.
Youtube. It’s some sort of video sharing website.
It activated on Valentine’s Day of 2005 and that’s because it was originally meant
to be a dating site.
One of the co-founders Steve Chen said the idea was for single people to upload videos
introducing themselves and describing what they’re looking for. Sounds pretty crazy.
The first video is “Me at the zoo” uploaded by one of the other co-founders
and it’s only nineteen seconds long.
It has over 50 million views. Wow that's a lot of people on the internet. woo!
Alright if I've learned anything from watching movies like Back to the Future we shouldn't meddle in the future
too much so
Let’s go to the past.
Where we also shouldn't meddle because that could change the future but who cares.
So what were some of the earliest websites?
Well it was primarily used by scientific departments and physics labs as originally intended.
One of the earliest webcomics, Dr. Fun was actually launched in 1993. Ahh humor!
The internet has also been used in advertising more and more recently.
There’s a movie coming out soon that I can't wait for. Has one of my favorite b-ball players. It's called Space Jam, and let's look at the website.
Apparently it was made by five people because the studio wouldn’t give them very much
money for it, which is understandable because not a lot of people currently use the internet. But it is a pretty money site.
Maybe someday everyone will use the internet and have tiny computers they keep in their
pockets that are all connected to the world wide web.
But that’s just me fantasizing again. Ol' Jake Roper!
You know the little blue alien from that new hit song Blue (Da Ba Dee)?
*Jake's incredible vocals*
Well he has his own website.
Zorotl.com.
You can check out how he met the band on his home planet and all the exciting things he
has planned for the future. I bet he's gonna be more than just a one hit wonder. Ahh so good at predicting the future.
You’ve heard of webcams right?
They’re basically cameras that connect to the internet.
It's wild. And I know, video on the internet seems crazy, but it’s possible!
The first webcam ever was installed at Cambridge University.
Probably for some super smart intellectual cause...but it wasn't.
It was used to watch a coffee pot so the folks
at the Cambridge computer lab wouldn’t go all the way to break room to find there was
no coffee. Where's the coffee Cthulhu? The old gods, they love coffee.
Anyways, the longest running webcam is Fogcam.org, was started in 1994 by two students at SF state university. That's
San Francisco University to give outsiders and feel for student life on campus.
It changed locations a few times over the years now but it’s still going pretty strong. Good job fog friends.
Isn’t the internet a weird, wacky, and wonderful place?
*phone rings*
Sorry I'm getting I'm getting a phone call on my cellular telephone.
Hello? What's that? No way! oh okay! Thank you. Bye bye!
I just got a phone call form my friend Chaz. He says now you can order things off the internet.
And one of the websites he recommended is curiositybox.com
Now the curiosity box is a quarterly subscription service that Michael, Kevin and myself have
made and we curate and design all of the products in the box. It's filled with science toys,
fun physics puzzles, there's logic puzzles, t-shirts, books and much more.
And a portion of the proceeds goes to Alzheimer's research.
We've actually been able to raise over $100,000 so far so check it out.
You can have it shipped to your door through the internet.
You wanna know something else that's cool? There's a thing called a hyperlink that you can click on
and we have hyperlinks all in the description down there for all the stuff we talked about.
Or there's something called a playlist and it's not like a cassette tape playlist that you make
for your honey doodle. It's a thing full of videos. You can check here too.
And last but not least, did you know on the internet there's something you can do called
mail. You can send electronic mail to people all over the world.
You don't have to pay for postage stamps! It's free! Isn't that wild?
Ahh. The internet is really neat and I hope it stays around for a while
because I would like to play online video games. I have an idea for one.
It's like counter terrorists vs terrorists. I wanna call it maybe Opposing Strike or Counter force
Something like that. I'm still working on it! And as always, thanks for watching.
Hail Cthulhu