Where Were You When You First Experienced the World Wide Web
Recently, I was writing up a self profile. I got to the part about starting to work with the Internet and it made me think about where and when I first saw the World Wide Web. To be clear, I was using the Internet before the WWW, but seeing the graphical web for the first time was consequential. I was in college, in the basement of Hill Center. This is where they used to (and may still) keep CS students. Computer labs and offices often have the distinction of finding space in basements or "dungeons".
In any case, it was 1993 and I was back in one of the private offices in the bowels of Hill Center (I worked for the school's computer facilities department, so I had access to more people and equipment and software than most). A friend called me over to show me the original Mozilla web browser. I was floored. I had never seen anything like it.
In many ways this memory is fresh, like the memory of where I was when I heard that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded on January 28, 1986 (I was at a friend's house playing hooky from school). Or that Princess Diana had died in a car accident. Or some people remember where they were when JFK was assassinated (not me... that was before my time). These latter incidents are all tragedies, different from seeing Mozilla for the first time, but the memory is as clear. We don't have a shared cultural date for the experience, but I suspect I'm not the only one who found it a memorable one.