Dominic Sparks

My first encounter with the web, as for many of my peers, was way back in early 1993.  One of my fellow Imperial College students was sitting at a great big Sun Workstation monitor, using something that caught my eye.  It was the Mosaic browser.  Mark sat there, controlling it, exploring the all-new cyberspace, and discovering all kinds of new and wondrous things.  Around us were dozens youthful hackers, mostly still trying to grow their first beard (including some of the girls), hunched over unix command lines, probably mostly using archie, ftp, and various other beardy things that I didn’t really understand (And nor did I want too!)  The contrast was astonishing.  Yes, both groups were using the internet, but whereas the hackers were like stargazers reaching out to points far off in the galaxy,  Mark, with his Mosaic browser, was like the pilot of a spaceship. From another planet, showing me things that I’d never imagined!  Well, it was only hypertext, with the odd <img> thrown in. But it was great – you could point at things, and click on links, and before you knew it you’d gone down some wormhole of links and ended up somewhere else.  Truly amazing.

I tried it… And I hated it… none of my friends could understand why, but I think it was the feeling of agoraphobia. I was overwhelmed by the size of this space (obviously, the web was really tiny then, actually small enough to fit on this).  I felt distinctly uneasy about landing on a page in a way that is not dissimilar to waking up in an unknown village, in an unknown land, knowing nothing of its location, or of how I got there.  I had no mental-model of this ‘World Wide Web’, of it’s shape and form, or it’s boundaries; No concept of how things existed in it, and how they related to each other.  It wasn’t that I misunderstood the web (even now a lot of people don’t understand it), just that I wasn’t at ease with not knowing exactly what kind of a thing it was.  I couldn’t fit the whole structure of cyberspace-and-time in my head, so I’d just have to figure out the bits I needed.

It took me until 1994 to feel entirely happy about this, and in fact, until then there wasn’t really anything useful on the web anyway!  Since then I’ve stayed pretty much your typical web-user; I’ve visited far-off lands, brought back treasures from overseas, and even landed on new worlds – all from the comfort of my armchair. But at least now I’m happy about how I got there and where exactly ‘there’ is.

So comfortable am I with this 15 year-old technology that I’ve finally decided to create a blog. And here it is. Welcome to Dom’s World (ah, thats been taken. How about ‘Sparkology‘, no it’s not that either!). Dum-di-dum…. Ah well, anyway, this is my blog, and you’re welcome to it. For what it’s worth…