In November 1989, I found myself in Pittsburgh where — in addition to experiencing firsthand how dead a city’s downtown can be on a Sunday evening — I attended the Association for Computing Machinery‘s Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. I was surrounded by an international crowd of luminaries on human-computer interaction design, and the question that seemed to be on everybody’s lips was this:
This hypertext stuff is super-cool. So…what’s it for? What’s its practical purpose ever going to be?
Who knew the World Wide Web was about to happen?
Happy 25th anniversary, you world-transforming sewer of porn, pop-ups, narcissism and rage, you.
Peter Dorfman Creative Services 