THIS WEEK’S ACTION PLAN

While you may not have a 27-year history on the web, everyone learns important lessons along the way. Think back to the first lesson that the web taught you – share it with your colleagues, and send it to me: I’m interested.

Test yourself: Do you know what BBS, Usenet, IRC, Gopher, WAIS, Telnet, FTP, Mosaic, URL, JPEG, and GIF are all used for?  Can you decipher the acronyms?  Back then, the digital marketing canvas was vastly different.  Scroll to the bottom for the answers.

An historical parallel?  Compare the world of the web to the world of the automobile.  When cars were first introduced, becoming adept at engine repair was a necessity.   Today, everyone is a specialist:  mechanics are experts at repairing cars, Indy 500 drivers are experts at driving them.  For most others, a car is only a means of transportation: it must be safe, comfortable, a bit snazzy, and reasonably priced.  In the now-mature world of the web, there are specialists in strategy, user experience, branding, content, community-building, and a myriad of different technologies.  It’s no longer the wild west in web town.

Answers: And for the overly curious, here are the answers to the test. (With apologies for the simplifications.)

• BBS:  Bulletin Board System.  These were private dial-up discussion forums, file archives; the first social network – even though they were not connected to the internet.
• Usenet:  The first internet bulletin board, started in 1980, effectively replaced by web-based discussion forums and Social Media.
• IRC: Internet Relay Chat:  Think of this as the “first” chat software.
• Gopher: A forerunner to the world wide web, a gopher site would contain a hierarchical menu of text links, eventually leading to a document. The browser and the web ultimately made this obsolete.
• WAIS:  Wide Area Information Server:  An early search engine protocol, that allowed users to search across different WAIS servers. No longer functioning.
• Telnet:  This is a protocol to connect to another computer using a command-line interface.  Still in use today, but most who need this use the secure SSH (“Secure Shell”) program instead.
• FTP:  File Transfer Protocol.  Still available it is used to transfer files from one computer to another.  Today, almost all developers use a secure version (SFTP – Secure Shell FTP)  of it.
• Mosaic:  The first browser: quickly replaced by Netscape, which was eventually replaced by Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.
• URL:  Uniform Resource Locator:  How a resource – such as a file on a web server – is identified.
• JPEG and GIF:  Joint Photographic Experts Group, and Graphics Interchange Format:  Both of these are standard file formats for graphics.

If there is a term that you do not know, please let me know: happy to help decipher!  – Randall