ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1994 I was a final year undergraduate student at the University of Edinburgh. One afternoon, while working in the library, Duncan, a friend and fellow student who was also a part-time software developer, suggested we visit the student microlab. The microlab was the Law School’s collection of IBM PCs and Apple Macs, all networked to form a local area network or LAN, and used mostly by students for word processing and instant messaging with friends. He said he had something new and exciting to show me: a wonderful new device that had just been installed. Despite Duncan’s obvious enthusiasm, I was quite sceptical. Duncan was an excellent software engineer and tended to get terribly excited by the most mundane of items such as a new PC chipset or an upgrade to the operating system. I saw myself as a lawyer not a computer scientist; as such I was rarely enthralled by such technology. Still, that afternoon he convinced me to come along. Once we were in the lab he logged on and brought up a grainy black and white picture on the monitor. I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing but after a few seconds I discerned that I was looking at a half-full filter coffee pot. I asked what was so exciting about this image. He told me I was looking at a live picture of a coffee pot in the computer laboratory at the University of Cambridge.1 At first this didn’t really make sense to me. How could I be
looking at a coffee pot in Cambridge? Duncan then explained to me that the computers in the microlab had recently been installed with a new piece of software called Mosaic, which allowed access to a new area on the internet called the World Wide Web. He went on to explain the basics of the web and as soon as his explanation was over I was hooked. This simple action of showing me that I could look at a coffee pot 400 miles away by typing a few characters changed the way I thought about computers and technology. I, like many millions before and since, became an instant devotee of the web.
