RenoVous

  It all started in 1958, when President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency. UCLA Professor of Computer Science, Leonard Kleinrock, was working on developing an information transfer technology called "packet switching," which broke information into smaller bundles.  This made the info easier to transmit and could be reassembled on the receiving end. ARPANET was launched in September of 1969, when the networking hardware was installed. And on this day, the first electronic message was successfully sent from UCLA to Stanford.  The message was supposed to be "LOGIN" but the system crashed after the first two letters, so it was simply "LO." The next nodes added were at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, followed by Harvard and the University College of London.

  Here we are on the Blogger platform, the oldest of blogging sites, originally developed by Pyra Labs in 1999. I became a member in 2014, I think just through establishing a username to comment on other blogs/articles.  In 2015, I found the Disqus channels. When those disbanded, I decided to launch my own blog.  In fact, that birthday is this week as well! Most of the sites I follow now are through Blogger, but one community went with the Mighty Network. *** The original Blogger was just for sharing text.  When Google purchased it in 2003, the features became free.  In 2004, they purchased Picasa, and merged the two to allow image posting.

And here we are on the internets, engaging with one another, learning from one another.  Social media may have negative components, but for me, it's largely positive. I joined a message board in high school and got my first taste of communicating with people all over the world.  It was Metallica that brought us all together, but we found so much more to share with each other.  I still keep in contact with some of those folks through Facebook, and if I ever make it to Europe, I have some long overdue meetups to make happen. I signed up for Disqus in 2013 but that was because a local news site used their commenting platform.  It wasn't until 2015 that I found the channels, and a new way to connect with people from all over. I enjoyed that so much that we ended up here, with my own blog.  I never would have expected this, and I appreciate every upvote, every recommend, every comment. From me in Reno, to you, wherever you are - I am happy to kno...