We take technology for granted and know that we can learn the answer to any question with the tap of a few keys. We work and play in the Cloud on our many devices and even our appliances are connected to the IoT. Sometimes, it is good to take a look back to see how very far we have come.
MAY 5 – It was on this day in 1995 that 24-year-old Chris Lamprecht became the first person to be banned from the internet. He is a computer hacker known as “Minor Threat” but was never proven guilty of a computer crime, making his sentence even more unique. Lamprecht was sentenced to seventy months in prison for money laundering from the sale of stolen circuit boards. His internet ban sentence was to run until 2003.
MAY 17 – On this day in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee installed his HyperText Markup language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) on a server at CERN. This server was then connected to the World Wide Web allowing, for the first time, websites to be more than text only. Even though they did not post a webpage at that time, this was the creation of the WWW standard.
MAY 22 – Namco installed the first Pac-Man machine in a movie theater in Tokyo on this day in 1980. Created by Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man was one of the most popular games in history and created many spin-offs including Ms. Pac-Man. Pac-Man was released in North America October of that year and has remained a pop-culture icon in the US appearing in popular movies, music, and TV shows.