Three decades ago, I registered the domain spy.co.uk and started sending and receiving email at [email protected]
About a year earlier had acquired a mobile phone, on Orange, the upstart and consumer-focused telco created by Hutchison.
The development of the domain name system, on top of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), Ethernet and other data transport layers, and the creation of the Web (HTML and http), created the basis for a nascent explosion of global information and services.
I have had the same email address and mobile phone number for over half my life, and expect to have them for the rest of it.
And how we – humans, people – have transformed the world since, leveraging the potential of computing and digitisation; networks and mobile communications; and silicon and radio frequency chips.
In that time I have worked in – and to a small extent contributed to – the development of the Web as a platform for communication, publishing, broadcasting and every facet of personal, social and business and public life.
I have facilitated the establishment of the discipline and practice of user experience design – for the ‘desktop’ Web, mobile devices and entertainment screens – which has made the potential of digital networks accessible to almost everyone on the planet.
We – millions of scientists and researchers, engineers and designers, entrepreneurs and business-people, developers and technicians, politicians and policy-makers – have created more improvements in our quality of life than any other development in the last half-century.
We should retain and extend our ambition to harness technology and creativity to increase our powers.
Spy Graphics (spy.co.uk) home page, November 1996