Website Tips for Success —DeWese
THIS IS my 250th column for PRINTING IMPRESSIONS and, as I predicted way back in my first year—1984—the world population would reach 6.6 billion people. How is it I am accurately prescient? Remarkable!
I also predicted the U.S. population would reach 300 million. Yep. I was right about this also. Gee, I’m good.
Furthermore, in these very pages in 1984, I predicted the number of Websites and blogs would total about 6.7 billion—and, I’m pretty sure that I am right about that number. The remarkable thing about that last prediction is that 1984 was six years before the World Wide Web was invented by (Brit) Timothy Berners-Lee and (Belgian) Robert Cailliau.
How I Invented the WWW
I was making sales calls in the South and met these guys at the Ramada Inn cocktail lounge in Geneva, AL. Soon we were joined by another young man, a politician from Tennessee named Al.
Tim and Robert were motorcycling across the United States, and Al had gotten lost looking for Tennessee and decided to spend the night.
We drank and talked about bass fishing and country music and, eventually, the conversation moved to more cerebral topics. Tim told us he had assembled a homemade computer. I said, “Well, you silly, why didn’t you just buy an Apple?” They had been introduced several years earlier.
I swallowed some more Jack Daniels and remarked how I had been a trouble-shooter for the first computer, the Eniac, in Philadelphia. Soon, I was telling these three new friends about an idea I had for something called the World Wide Web, where people and companies could set up Websites to sell stuff and tell about themselves.
My companions seemed to like the idea and started taking notes on cocktail napkins. I gave them several technical embellishments to add to their notes and, Voila!, I had invented the World Wide Web!
