In 1991, I was in graduate school for the first time. <\/p>\n
My professors kept chattering with enthusiasm about something called “Hypertext”. <\/p>\n
So one day I asked the smartest hippest youngest one of them: David, what the eff is Hypertext?<\/em><\/p>\n He didn’t actually know, but because he was a Professor, that didn’t stop him from trying to convince me that he did know. <\/p>\n The clearest thing I was able to glean from his non-answer was that it was, he claimed, a way of linking one document to another document. <\/p>\n To me, a document was an object printed on paper, like a grocery list or a novel. I had already produced many such documents myself. In fact, I was required as a student to produce them, and the teachers insisted that they be typed and not handwritten, even though there were already very few typewriters around. <\/p>\n So I had produced them via “word processing”, on a tiny desktop Mac, in a computer lab on campus, a lab that wasn’t networked at all, except to the lumbering tractor-feed printers that mechanically produced acceptable hard copies of … documents. <\/p>\n How were these documents supposed to be linked?<\/p>\n I didn’t know. Beyond idle intellectual curiosity, I didn’t care either. I thought it had something to do with footnotes, and I let the question slide away utterly. <\/p>\n 1991 was (as things turned out) also the year Saint Tim invented the Web, and HTML. Hypertext. Markup. Language. <\/p>\n Thus we eventually got the formulation: <\/p>\n http:\/\/wwww … hypertext transfer protocol, networked over the world wide web. <\/p>\n Linkage, of documents.<\/p>\n Only problem with the whole idea was that no one, not even my hippest professor, had a browser, or any idea about how or where to get one. Much less a live network connection. <\/p>\n Three years later, Netscape Navigator began to change that, and a year after that, Windows 95 came out, bundled with another browser, called Internet Explorer. <\/p>\n We have liftoff. <\/p>\n Well, maybe you did, that early. Personally I was driving trucks with fiftythree foot trailers all over 46 states and two provinces at the time, and I had no environment in which to experience the slowly building storm of hype. <\/p>\n I quit the trucking industry on New Year’s Day in 1997. I had a fat stack of cash. I bought a van and put my futon in it. I bought a new Walkman for my cassette tapes. I bought a very fine analog camera. And I bought a computer. A real live laptop computer. <\/p>\n Trying to economize, I got one with a black and white screen. And no modem, because what would I want that for anyway? I literally and honestly had no clue. <\/p>\n Most of a year later, I was broke again regardless, and living in the van, and went back to a city to grudgingly seek employment, god dammit, again. <\/p>\n I was selected from a pool of 42 applicants to be the new paraprofessional librarian at a community college in Albuquerque. Because of a fond reference check from a lovely someone I hadn’t seen in a decade. <\/p>\n My new employer, the Library, had computers. The computers were networked. And they had browsers too. <\/p>\n I hit the freshly paved cyberbricks with a lustful, hungry vengeance. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1991, I was in graduate school for the first time. My professors kept chattering with enthusiasm about something called “Hypertext”. So one day I asked the smartest hippest youngest one of them: David, what the eff is Hypertext? He didn’t actually know, but because he was a Professor, that didn’t stop him from trying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7843"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7860,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843\/revisions\/7860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}