The internet is a beautiful place

I still remember the day when “the internet” was introduced. It was in high school during a computer science class.

The teacher explained that you could click on the Internet Explorer logo, then type in an Internet address starting with http://www. and there you go. Although in that time there was hardly anything to discover. There wasn’t anything more than a handful of websites, like Lycos and MTV. Social media did not yet exist. Google and Amazon weren’t even born. YouTube and TikTok weren’t even invented.

There were only simple HTML websites with some text and a logo. It had to be simple because the internet connection was over a telephone line and therefore so, so sloooowwww. Apart from the fact that we also didn’t have fancy coding and scripting languages.

Those simple static websites are all almost gone now, but if you dig deep you sometimes find a true treasure, such as Wim’s Fröbel Pagina’s.

Do yourself a favor and take a look at this website (link below). Look at the simplicity, the illustrations, and Comic Sans!

A library at your fingertips

Data Walhalla

Nowadays the web has exploded into a great information heaven because that’s the internet in my opinion. Name a topic, no matter how obscure and niche, and you’ll find kilos and kilos of bytes about it.

And that is why, as a good citizen, I want to contribute to that great knowledge machine. No matter how small my role is.

Learn from it

The road to knowledge

To be honest, I’ve never considered myself a person who would create content for others to learn from. My primary goal at the start of this website, was actually to understand certain topics better myself and to learn from it.

Yet that is exactly the purpose of this website. And although at times I have no idea what exactly I’m doing, I started anyway. Fueled by a little faith that things will work out somewhere.

The people who know me well, are all too familiar with this next story. I’ve told it thousands of times. And for a reason. Important memories should become stories you keep telling.

The story is about the time when I was 6 years old and suddenly got a card from my mother for the local library. With that small plastic card, my mother told me, I could borrow books. (Small side note: you have to remember that I grew up in a tiny, boring village somewhere in The Netherlands, way before computers, the internet, games, and Netflix.)

Learning new things is why I get up in the morning. I like the gray area of “not knowing” or “knowing a little”. That is perhaps also what I find so interesting about life itself. It is sometimes difficult to comprehend and understand or even make sense of it.

But oh oh, that moment when you get it, when you solve the puzzle, crack the code, when it all makes damn sense.