A Look Back

The first computer that I used was way back in high school in the seventies. It was a typewriter style terminal that we entered our programs into and the data was transmited to the local university where their large computer did the computations for us. We didn't see the results until the next day when a delivery arrived to our school with all our results. If there were any errors in our programs, we'd have to start all over again and wait another day again to see the results.
I've been surfing the Internet since the early days of MS-DOS and dial up modems. My first real powerhouse computer was a 286 IBM compatible computer. It had a whopping 16 MB hard drive and a 5.25" floppy drive. I bought and installed a 14.4 modem later on and I remember the first time I used my modem. I had come across a phone number of a local modem Bulletin Board and dialed them up to find out what it was all about. I found an active forum, some file downloads and a few more phone numbers to keep me going. I was hooked. I joined several BBSs' in the area and there was a couple of times that I dialed a long distance number to access some remote BBS that offered something I couldn't find locally.
I take my broadband connection for granted these days, and get a bit frustrated when the load time on my browser takes longer than several seconds. I've forgotten about those long overnight downloads I used to endure to download the latest shareware demo of some new game.
The Internet has grown a lot since I first logged on, and I can't even begin to imagine what the future will bring. How will we access all this information in say 20 years from now. Your guess is as good as mine.