The Internet’s Still Just Getting Started, After Twenty Years

Dec 26, 2014

It’s 2014, I’m in a virtual lobby, in front of a portal to my 2004 article where I discussed my first experience with the Internet in 1994. Very meta.

Yep. Ten years today I wrote an article about how I got started using the Internet ten years before that. Remarkably I found the article in my archives and republished it here.

I now have that same excitement and tinkering mentality I had back in 1994. We’re witnessing the birth of Virtual Reality and the next iteration of human connectivity referred to as a MetaVerse.

So, this evening, wearing my Oculus Rift 3D goggles, using the Janus VR 3D Internet browser, I entered a virtual lobby and created a portal (link) to my article (pictured above). And walked through it, fully immersed.

When powerhouse Facebook invested $2 billion in Oculus earlier this year (a burgeoning startup with no product or revenue but a prototype headset and a small but enthusiastic community of game and media developers), they helped catalyze the birth of a new industry, a new Internet, a new era.

I’ve always been enthusiastic about 3D graphics, but in the intervening years since my 2004 post, I’ve focused on the two-dimensional internet— web pages, web browsing, 2D images, text layouts, database applications. All that’s about to change.

It reminds me of the classic book Flatland, written in 1880, about a square who lives in a two-dimensional world and goes about his life without being able to conceive of a three-dimensional one. A virtually mind bending tale.

I wonder what I’ll be writing about in 2024.

Meta.