Twenty-five years ago the Internet as we now know it was in the process of being birthed by the National Science Foundation. Since then it's been an information explosion. From e-mail to eBay, communication and shopping have forever changed.
By Barrett Lyon, Opte.org
1 World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee created user-friendly "Web pages" that could travel over the Internet, a network built to shuttle research between universities. The world logged on: 747 million adults in January.
2 E-mailTech’s answer to the Pony Express . Programs such as 1988’s Eudora made it easy to use. In-boxes have been filling up ever since. Nearly 97 billion e-mails are sent each day.
3 Graphical user interface (GUI) Most computer displays were blinking lines of text until Apple featured clickable icons and other graphic tools in its 1984 Mac. Microsoft's Windows took GUI ( pronounced 'gooey' ) to the masses.
By Mark Lennihan, AP
4 AOL AOL turned people on to Web portals, chat rooms and instant messaging. Early subscribers paid by the hour. AOL once boasted 35 million subscribers. It bought Time Warner for $106 billion in 2001.
5 Broadband The answer to the drip-drip-drip of dial-up, high-speed Internet service fuels online entertainment. About 78% of home Internet users in the U.S. have broadband, up from less than 1% in 1998.
6 Google So popular it’s a verb. The search powerhouse, with a market capitalization of nearly $149 billion, perfected how we find info on the Web. Google sites had nearly 500 million visitors in December.
7 Mosaic/Netscape Created by Marc Andreessen and others, Mosaic was the first widely-used multimedia Web browser. Spin-off Netscape Navigator ruled the ‘90s until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer took off around ‘98.
8 eBay Thanks to eBay, we can all now buy and sell almost anything (skip the body parts). eBay has 230 million customers worldwide who engage in 100 million auctions at any given time.
Screenshot
9 Amazon.comJeff Bezos’ baby began as an always-in-stock book seller. It survived the tech bubble and now is the definitive big box online store. It was the second most-visited online retailer in December, after eBay.
10 Wi-fi Have coffee shop, will compute: Wireless fidelity lets us lug our laptops out of the office and connect to the Net on the fly. More than 200 million Wi-Fi equipped products sold last year.
11 Instant Messaging LOL! Web surfers began to “laugh out loud” and BRB (“be right back”) in the mid-‘90s, with the launch of ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger. Millions use it to swap messages and photos, even telephone pals.
By John Makely, AP
12 Yahoo! Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created this popular Web portal in 1994. It remains a favorite for email, photo sharing (it owns Flickr) and other services.
Screenshot
13 Compuserve/Prodigy In the 1980s, they became the first mainstream companies to offer consumer Internet access. CompuServe was more for the geek set; Prodigy was more for the masses.
14 The Well The precursor for social networking, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, founded in 1985, was the original (now longest-running) virtual community. It gained popularity for its forums.
15 Vices Regulators scrapped plans for a .xxx domain, but vice remains one of the Net’s biggest businesses. Online gambling, illegal in the U.S., topped $12 billion last year; online porn was $2.84 billion. Searches for "Paris Hilton video" return about a million hits.
By David Rae Morris, USA TODAY
16 Spam/Spyware Unsolicited e-mail, and software that watches your Web habits, mushroomed from annoyance to menace. Junk e-mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 messages sent over the Internet.
17 Flash Adobe’s Flash player is on 98% of all computers. Seen a video on YouTube or MySpace? Then you’ve probably used Flash. It animated the Web, spawning zillions of online cartoons and videos.
18 Online mapping tools MapQuest started saving marriages in 1996 by offering turn-by-turn directions. Followers such as Yahoo and Google beam directions to cellphones and offer satellite images of neighborhoods.
19 Napster Created in Shawn Fanning’s dorm room, Napster let more than 26 million people tap into a free database of music. Record companies shut it down. In its wake emerged legitimate download sites, such as Apple’s iTunes.
Handout
20 YouTube The video-sharing site, bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, ignited a user-generated revolution online and introduced millions to the delights of Stephen Colbert, Chad Vader and Lonelygirl15.
21 The Drudge Report Matt Drudge’s news site helped break the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998, paving the way for politically-minded bloggers everywhere. He claims to have about 500 million visitors a month.
22 Bloggers The more than 75 million Web logs have changed how the world gets its news. Bloggers have challenged the traditional media, lobbied for and against wars, started debates, and posted far too many pictures of their pets.
23 Craigslist Craig Newmark’s gathering place for (mostly) free classified ads changed the way we find apartments, cars and dates. The site relies on users who supply friendly neighborhood information - about 14 million ads a month.
24 MySpace This online hangout has replaced the mall as a home away from home for teenagers. The site has more than 173 million personalized pages. News Corp paid $580 million for it in 2005.
Handout
Today as I was riding into work on the train, I read a newspaper advertisement aimed at people trying to find a job. Some of the words were hard to make out, because the woman holding the paper kept shifting in her seat. She’s not really into sharing. But the headline that caught my eye was, "Learn the 40 Words that Professionals Use". Amazed that they only use forty, I wanted to know more.
Generally, I don’t read from the woman in front of me, because frankly, her tastes don’t match my own. Lately, she has vacillated between exploitive entertainment-industry rags and paperbacks filled with romantic woes. I never found out how the previous one ended, but in the last passage I read Camilla and Thor were racing away from the castle of her torment on a thunderous steed with rain pounding down upon their ravaged bodies clad only in! Well, you get the picture.
Words can say a lot about you:
-the ones you use in conversation, -the ones you choose to read, -and the ones you write. Limiting your vocabulary to say, forty words, can stunt your development, socially and professionally. Restricting syntax to that of your profession provides transitional barriers as well. To be successful in an upwardly mobile lifestyle, you will need the use of words and phrases that relate your experiences, feelings and intentions to others. It should also be noted that those "others" who lead us and set policies may not be chemists. For many, our futures lie in the hands of MBA’s or, shall I say it, marketing specialists.
These creatures of the outside world seldom care about thermodynamic equations, even though they may someday face entropic death. They speak of real cats, not those trapped in theoretical boxes, and the only retro-synthesis they have experienced is the post-modern fashion flashback to the 70’s.
The most common relational denominators typically deal with societal trends and fads. Places to look for help include sports, movies, or if you’re really desperate, "American Idol." Even if you don’t watch the TV show, knowing that Sanjaya’s hairstyle weekly evolves into gravity defying configurations can give you an entrée into a conversation.
Knowing the language of other professions is also helpful. In addition to speaking English, Spanglish and broken German, I have training in finance, project management and IT. Coming from a background in the "central science', learning how to speak like others seems old hat. Goodness knows I’ve already had to learn the lingo of biology, physics and medicine just to ensure that my research projects went smoothly.
Ultimately, the best tool for the expansion of your vocabulary is reading, and although it may sound like a foreign phrase, "reading for pleasure' will yield the best results. Certainly, you should be reading technical articles and books for your professional development, but they are unlikely to incorporate the plethora of vernacular used in common language.
In closing, I challenge you to flex your linguistic tongue, by learning the 40 words used by professionals. If the lady in front of me would move her thumb, I would read them to you. As it stands, I guess you’ll have to search them out yourselves.
This article was written by David Harwell, Ph.D., Assistant Director of the ACS Department of Career Management and Development.
Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.
Published April 30, 2007
