21 November 25

Great moments in Internet history: In November 1977, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) published the first official protocols (rules) for email messages. The ARPANET had 63 connected "nodes" at that time; it became the backbone for what would become the global Internet. My tie celebrates computers, email and the Internet; my tie clip is a small chip of circuit board.

29 November 23

Greetings! Today (29 November) includes a new-to-me celebration called (National) Electronic Greetings Day. The idea is to recall all the different kinds of electronic greetings you've used, from email through whatever fantastic app you prefer today. My own history for such greetings began with email at the University of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky University; at EKU I was among the very first instructors to use email with my students (around 1991). Today I like to create funny animated greetings with JibJab, and of course I send many happy messages to my Facebook friends. Someday I may grow into Instagram or whatever comes next. My tie celebrates computers, email and the Internet.

26 March 23

This is the 47th anniversary of the first British royal email! Queen Elizabeth II, while visiting the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, pressed a few keys on a desktop terminal to send a message through ARPANET, one of the precursors to the Internet. "The email itself was to announce the arrival of a new programming language that had been developed and was headed 'A Message from Her Majesty the Queen' and signed off with an informal 'Elizabeth R' — the same sign off the Queen has used for all her digital communication ever since." My tie celebrates email and computers and the Internet, and my tie bar bears a royal crown. Some other notes for today: it is National Spinach Day, celebrating the 1937 erection of a statue of "Popeye the Sailor Man" in Crystal City Texas, and it marks the birthday of Robert Frost (1874), Leonard Nimoy (1931), Tennessee Williams (1911) and Jamison Patrick David Haskins (2014).

23 August 21

Today's computers-email-Internet tie celebrates the 30th anniversary of the opening of the World Wide Web. The primary developer of the protocols and linking that wove the Web was Tim Berners-Lee, working at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. He invented the basics in 1989 and gradually grew the connections and nodes that were opened to the world in 1991.

24 August 20

Happy Birthday, public World Wide Web! On 23 August (yesterday) 1991, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee released the first "browser" for the World Wide Web. This was a program that allowed users to retrieve files over the newly expanding "Internet," using links called Uniform Resource Locators. At first, users had to know which URL would give them the starting point for their "surfing," but soon there were search tools like "Archie" and then "Veronica" to help us find Web sites more efficiently. The first graphical browser (displaying images and decorated pages) came out in 1993. Everything you do today with Chrome or Firefox or Safari or (ugh, arggh!) Edge depends on what Berners-Lee did in 1991.

30 April 19

Today should be celebrated as Web Independence Day, or Web Freedom Day! It was on April 30, 1993, that Tim Berners-Lee, the original developer of the World Wide Web, received a signed and stamped declaration from his employers (the CERN particle physics lab) "to allow anybody to use the Web protocol and code free of charge, to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint." (one source) My tie celebrates computers, email and the Internet!

26 March 18

On this date in 1976, Queen Elizabeth II became the first head of state to send an email message. The network at the time was called ARPANET and it was designed primarily to serve military communications. Her email account was set up with the username "HME2" (for Her Majesty Elizabeth II). In her message she announced that the Coral 66 programming language was available on ARPANET! I'm including a photo of this royal inauguration. My tie celebrates email, personal computers and the Internet.


26 March, 1976:

13 July 17

This is "Embrace Your Geekness Day." Geeks are famous for their enchantment/obsession with anything new in technology. I would label myself as a "weak geek": I do not rush out to own the latest items, but I do enjoy our Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, and I have Amazon's "Reverb" on all of my computers and my iPhone, so I can use "Alexa" whenever I need her. I think it would be very cool to have an implantable brain chip for Internet access, but I'm not interested in Bluetooth tattoos or most of the "wearable technology" marketed to geeks. My tie celebrates computers and email and the Internet; it's from the era before iPods, iPhones, iPads and Google.

30 April 15

The 30th of April is always a great day to celebrate Internet Independence. In 1993, the CERN particle physics laboratory granted public rights to the "Web" protocols developed by Tim Berners-Lee. For more details, see my entries from 2008 and 2012.

29-30 October 14

Happy Internet Day (yesterday)! This marks the moment when, in 1969, computer researchers at Stanford and UCLA achieved the first computer-to-computer communication; the story is told well at http://theinternetday.com. Sorry that I missed wearing my tie for the official celebration -- I was busy communicating person-to-person with Mallie Jayden Elizabeth Kleppinger.

13 July 14

I am Embracing My Geekness today by wearing my email-internet-computers tie. Read all about geekness at http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/07/embrace-your-geekness/.

 

7 April 13

Today's tie honors the 44th anniversary of the publication of "RFC 1." In 1969 I was a high school sophomore, and like essentially 100% of all humans, I was blissfully unaware of the event in network communications technology that would become the foundation for the global Internet. RFC 1 laid out the protocol (like grammar rules) by which interconnected computers could "talk to each other," over what was then called ARPA Net. The principal author, Steve Crocker of UCLA, used these words to describe RFC 1: "I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm, and reactions are expected." The historically-invaluable document itself was first rendered as electronic text twenty-eight years later.

30 April 12

Today should be celebrated as Web Independence Day, or Web Freedom Day! It was on April 30, 1993, that Tim Berners-Lee, the original developer of the World Wide Web, received a signed and stamped declaration from his employers (the CERN particle physics lab) "to allow anybody to use the Web protocol and code free of charge, to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint." (one source)

  

07 April 10

41 years ago today, the publication known as "RFC 1" was released, becoming the initial set of standards for shared network communications. Happy Birthday, Internet!

17 May 09

The United Nations has declared May 17 as World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, or more briefly World Information Society Day. "The purpose of World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD)is to help raise awareness of the possibilities that the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) can bring to societies and economies, as well as of ways to bridge the digital divide."

15 September 08

I spent most of the afternoon in Corbin, KY, helping faculty and staff at EKU's regional campus learn how to use Blackboard. It was all about email and the Internet.

I wore this tie on April 30, too.

30 April 08

In the future we might refer to 30 April as Web Independence Day. What we know as the World Wide Web was originally developed at CERN, a European particle physics research laboratory, by Tim Berners-Lee. He designed the first protocols in March, 1989, but "the true turning point for Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web would be on April 30, 1993, when he received a signed and stamped declaration from CERN stating that 'CERN agreed to allow anybody to use the Web protocol and code free of charge, to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint.'" (source) Happy Independence Day, WWW!