I named my blog as Terminal Junkie for a simple reason. I am hooked up to it ever since the general public ever heard of the word internet. I started going online in the year 1992 while I was studying at Western Michigan University. Back in those day we just have email for a one to one conversation and if we are to send an attachment we have to go thru a process call uuencode to convert the binary we want to send to a text format. and the receiver will have to uudecode it back to change the text form of attacement back to its binary form. And if we need to have a social discussion very much like what we are doing at facebook or other social networking site now, we resort to usenet.As for gathering information like what we do surfing the web now we use gopher. There ain’t any search engines like what we have today, and if we need to find the information we need we have to roam thru the usenet or gopher to get it which is kinda tedious. Not many people heard of those services anymore but it was the beggining of great things to come.

Then came the first browser from NCSA Mosaic, the “Daddy” of Netscape which gives us the new possibilities to render information into hypertext and simple graphical attachments. Slowly we have CSS, javascript or flash to make it more interactive like what we have today and innovations keeps coming and new services are built upon it. We can now have so many different kinds of applications running in a browser and slowly but surely it will be gonna be an OS by itself replacing many traditional OSes and desktop applications like what we have today. 

SUN was right many year ago by coining the term, “The Network is the Computer”. We no longer resort to have everything store on the Desktop or our Laptop. We moved on the the concept of Cloud Computing where you can virtually have your work done everywhere, be it at the office, at home, at the airport, or the cafe. You don’t even have carry your computer around. You can write a document for instance like this blog, save it and drive out to the nearest cafe and continue on from there using your laptop, your iPhone, or the computers at the cafe. One thing good about this concept is applications running on the browser is really seamless to us. We don’t have to update the OS or applications like what we do traditionally; applications on the browser are updated or bug fix on the background without any user interventions.

And with the new social networking sites we have like facebook or twitter or powerful search engines like google, news and information are basically at the tip of our fingers. I hardly read newspaper anymore. I can get news that I want realtime on place like twitter. For old archive informations I can digged it from google. If I am lost at a strange place there is Google Map and when I want to buy something but not sure about it I can always check out reviews all around the web. And we can share the many photos taken with our friends and stranger over at Flickr.

But that said, we are still at the very beginning stage of the evolution of Internet. Many new innovation surprises us day in day out and is beginning to hard to keep track of it. Google change the way we research, Twitter change the way of journalism, facebook change the way we network, and many more.

I am going to leave you with a funny youtube video asking people around the street, What is a browser? And you will be amaze what the answers are:-