Chapter 1. Introduction

My wife and I recently had a baby girl. As she grows up, I’ll teach her all kinds of things. Some of the things that I tell her she’ll accept as fact, and other times she’ll have her doubts. But the one thing I know for sure is that when I get to the part about the Web, she’ll be positively tickled when I describe what it looked like before she was born.

I’ll tell her that when we got started on the Web, developers had to be careful about which colors they used. I’ll let her know that when I bought my first domain, I had to fax in some paperwork and it cost me $70. But the thing that will blow her mind more than any other detail is that we had an entire button on our web browsers dedicated to refreshing the web page on the screen.