Inflation – 0%?

Well – not according to Stagecoach, that is.

Earlier this year the Megarider (a week’s worth of travel) went from £10 to £11, and on Sunday, the Dayrider (a day’s worth of travel) went from £3 to £3.30 – that’s 10%

Stagecoach are, of course, a business and they have to return a profit. And since deregulation in the 1980’s, there’s little control or external influence over them. What is more, according to a recent press article it looks as though they are “in the driving seat“.

Wouldn’t it be great, though, if there was just a little more competition?

Happy 20th birthday – WWW

The world wide web – whatever you think about it you wouldn’t be reading this if it didn’t exist!

My first exposure to computer networks was the ARPA net – and I remember the excitement at the Computer Lab when we were to get a 2.4kb (yes, 2.4kb) link via London to the States to join up with that. OK – that was a while ago – and it never went anywhere.

But Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee had an idea whilst working at CERN – the paper was titled: Information Management: A Proposal. In it he described a way to simplify the sharing of information among people in different locations. He gave it to his manager, Mike Sendall, who thought it was “vague, but exciting.”

Vague, but exciting – hardly an auspicious start for what is now the WWW!

Over the following year, Tim and his colleague, Robert Cailliau, refined the idea and updated the proposal. It described a concept called a “WorldWideWeb” — a simple interface for browsing large quantities of information, using hypertext to link documents. Within just a few years it had grown well beyond CERN and the academic realm, and public use of the Internet exploded thanks to this new, more intuitive interface.

Why the history lesson? Because the date on Tim Berners-Lee’s first paper, arguably the birth of the Web, was March 13th, 1989. That’s twenty years ago – and to me, that’s a reason to celebrate!

It’s amazing to think about how much the Web’s developed since then. It’s hard to imagine now what life would be like without the Web. Even more obscure to me is this: what would we all be doing if there were no Web?