Opportunity to Share
Globally
Janet Kuypers
4/9/19, written in honor of 4/7/69,
the symbolic birth of the Internet
Not too long before I was born, ARPA
(the Advanced Research Projects Agency)
gave BBN Technologies the contract to
build a precursor to the World Wide Web.
Less than two decades later, I went to college
as a computer science engineer at the university
that helped lay the groundwork for the Internet
(sorry Al Gore, it wasn’t all because of you).
When I look back, I think of how my life
in some ways may reflect the life of the
Internet — as we grew, so did my use of this
tool to spread my literary work to people,
with my hundreds of books and stacks of CDs
sold in more countries than I can count, to
musicians and authors literally on the other
side of the planet. Snail mail couldn’t do that.
You may have once called me a luddite, but
my literary magazine had a web page before
any other colleague I knew did. And thanks to
my web “partner in crime”, I like that I can give
people my opportunity to share their writing
with the rest of the world, thanks to this tool.
I didn’t know this brainchild, which was created
not too long before I was born, would parallel me
so thoroughly through every chapter of my life.
Forgive me for waxing poetic, but maybe the
Internet and I, in different ways, help people —
to not only get what they want, but to also grow.
...Okay, maybe I can’t call myself as grandiose
as the Internet, but really, it seems like the World
Wide Web has been on my trail my whole life. So
digital or not, we may be more alike than you think.
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