8 June 25

Wearing RED for Pentecost Sunday, celebrating the birthday of the Christian church (around 30 CE), and sporting my Web-addresses-and-symbols tie, to honor the birthday of Tim Berners-Lee (1955). In 1989 he created the standards for hypertext transfer protocol (http) as the language (or "tongue"?) for what became Internet communication.

7 April 23

54 years ago today, the world was not aware of the publication of "RFC 1" by the Network Working Group at UCLA. It would take (only) four years for the engineers working with the principles in that document to create the global Internet and then the World Wide Web. RFC 1 (meaning Request For Comments) set out the standards for communications between computer networks. Six and a half months later, on 29 October 1969, the first "inter-network" text message was successfully transmitted. My tie features a multitude of strings of symbols and characters resembling Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs, commonly called Web addresses. I'm also wearing my new tie bar built from part of a computer circuit board.

23 August 22

On my calendar I've long noted 23 August 1991 as the "birthday of the World Wide Web." Well, through a Web search today, I discovered that I have been misled/suckered! No one disputes the fact that Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, and there was some special Web activity in August 1991, but the real or "official" birthday of the Web is 12 March 1989. So I chose to wear my Web-text-and-icons tie today based on erroneous information! But I have corrected my calendar now, thanks to Google and Snopes.

11 March 22

Today marks the birthday of Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), the "grandfather of hypertext." During World War II he was the head of the U. S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which coordinated all sorts of projects to develop technology and weapons (including the Manhattan Project). Around 1945, Bush conceived the "encyclopedia of the future" as having a mesh (or web) of documents with associative trails running through it. His original design was built around an assembly of interconnected microfilm readers with sophisticated cross referencing. (A tag in the text on one slide of a microfilm reel could be used to trigger another microfilm reader to retrieve a page in a different document, and so on.) Useful development of this idea took about 40 years. The first computer file-linking program was Apple’s Filevision, in 1984, followed by “HyperCard” in 1987. The languages that create all of the linking in the Web -- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http://) -- are 31 years old this year. My tie shows many elements of the "gibberish" that shows up in HTML coding for the Web links we use constantly to navigate through our "encylopedia" of universal knowledge. One of my cloth masks for this pandemic is covered with a web of linked nodes.

10 March 21

Today’s tie full of Web-like addresses and icons honors the birthday (tomorrow) of Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), the “grandfather of hypertext” which stands behind all of the links on our Web pages. His original design, in 1945, was built around an assembly of interconnected microfilm readers with sophisticated cross referencing. The first computer file-linking program was Apple’s Filevision, in 1984, followed by “HyperCard” in 1987. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http://) are 30 years old this year.

7 April 20

51 years ago today, the world was not aware of the publication of "RFC 1" by the Network Working Group at UCLA. It would take (only) four years for the principles in that document (and the people working with it) to generate the global Internet and the World Wide Web. RFC 1 (meaning Request For Comments) set out the standards for communications between computer networks. Six and a half months after this event, on 29 October 1969, the first "inter-network" message was successfully transmitted. My tie features a multitude of strings of symbols and characters that resemble what we call Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs, commonly called Web addresses.

30 April 18

Today marks the 25th anniversary of "Web Freedom Day." On this date in 1993, the CERN physics/research laboratory granted all rights to the emerging Internet protocols to Tim Berners-Lee, who placed them in the public domain. From our perspective in 2018, the most significant invention was HyperText Transfer Protocol, establishing the communication channel represented by "http://" and providing with us with the power to link information through "the Web." My tie shows some Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and other texts and icons related to Internet development.

24 August 16

Today's tie bridges between yesterday's 25th anniversary of the opening of the World Wide Web and tomorrow's celebration of National Secondhand Wardrobe Day. When Tim Berners-Lee opened up the protocols for transmitting "Web pages" to personal computers in 1991, graphical "browsers" did not yet exist -- it would be several years before Netscape Communicator and Opera would debut. You really do not want to imagine what computer users had to go through to search for and download pages full of text! My tie is full of words and symbols from Web addresses, and what makes it good for National Secondhand Wardrobe Day is that it was bought for me several years ago at a secondhand clothing store!

24 February 16

Wearing a Web-design tie to honor the birthday (in 1955) of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers.

24 September 14

It's Nat'l Punctuation Day! Wait a minute; you knew that, right? Let's see: I've used an apostrophe, exclamation point, semicolon, comma, colon and question mark; here comes an ellipsis . . . and now there must be a period. My tie shows that Web addresses include many bits of punctuation.

24 June 13

Yesterday (June 23) marked the birthday of Internet Protocol inventor Vint Cerf (1943) and computer science genius Alan Turing (1912). Today marks the birthday of my nephew Curtis Nolan Huizenga (1967). Nolan has long been involved with both Internet stuff and pet rabbits, represented nicely by the fact that he registered the "watership.net" domain at least 15 years ago, in honor of Richard Adams' novel (or true story?) Watership Down.

15 March 12

On March 15, 1985, symbolics.com became the first-ever registered Internet domain. Three years later there were about 100. But today, after 27 years of ever-expanding growth, the number of registered domains is more than 220 million. There are now more devices connected to the Internet than people in the world. Visit the symbolics.com Web site for wonderfully awesome charts and facts about the Internet. My tie celebrates the day with a montage of URLs and other Internet "symbolics."

07 April 11

If it weren't for "RFC 1," I wouldn't have my current job and you would not be reading this on your computer. The document named RFC 1 was published on April 7, 1969, and it set out the communication standards that eventually became "the Internet" that we all have come to love/hate. This particular anniversary is special because it is number 42, which is also the Universal Answer.

22 September 09

This is "One Web Day," a holiday set aside to celebrate the seamlessness of the global Internet. The One Web Day Web site urges everyone to get involved in maintaining the democracy of the Web and its availability "everywhere."

26 May 09

First really muggy day for 2009, even though it's not very hot. EKU hasn't figured out how to turn the air conditioning on yet and so the office is very stuffy. I wore a hot orange shirt and my Web text tie.










Sunday was (1) Robert Wollenweber's 84th birthday, (2) Bob Dylan's 68th birthday, and (3) Methodism's "Aldersgate Day," celebrating John Wesley's conversion. My peace cross tie was suitable for all three, in very different ways.

29 April 08

In my life, "computer" ties are ALWAYS appropriate. This one was discovered for me by Courtney Tennill recently at a used clothing shop. So the good word for today is "Goodwill to Men."