I'm actually in the lesson for once, so I'm going to blog about it WHILE DOING IT. Yeah baby, this is so Web 2.0.

Computers used to be a people job. A person who did maths for a living, I guess that's just a mathematician or a maths teacher or something. There was no computer programming, as there were no computers, aside from people who did maths for a living - but you couldn't program them.

Totally had automated machines though - hell yeah, weaving.

1866: They laid a cable across the Atlantic. Everyone thought it was cool, but it didn't work very well and died in a few days. Kind of like Windows Vista.

1936 - 1938: Some dude called Konrad (great name) creates a binary computer.

1940 - 1943: Bombe and Colossus in Bletchley Park break the Enigma and Lorenz codes, helping win World War II for Allied forces. Eventually leads to chemical castration and suicide of Alan Turing. I've sat next to him, there's a statue in the gay village in Manchester.

1945: Vannevar Bush (what a weird name) proposes a photo-electrical-mechanical device called Memex, which can follow links between documents on a microfiche (small fish?). This is the beginning of hypertext and the Steampunk Internet.

1946: ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator). 30 tons; 30 units; 19,000 vacuum tubes and used 200 kilowatts of power. The Large Hadron Collider of the day, although much less likely to destroy the universe.

1950s: Computer networks come about. Mainframe computers, terminals all linked together (using a star topology!) within institutions (creating Intranets).

1957: The Soviet Union launch Sputnik 1.

1960s: Computer networks start linking into each other, creating Internets.

1962: Dr JCR Licklider heads ARPA's research into use of computers for military purposes.

1965: Ted Nelson coins the word "hypertext".

1969: ARPANET starts being made.

1970s: Mainframes became unpopular, people didn't want dumb terminals, smaller groups start to buy "minicomputers", separate from the mainframe. WANs start to appear.

1972: ARPANET creates email. Nigerian scammers rejoice.

1980s: Local Area Networks become invented. Many more computers are used, computers become affordable (and popular) for normal people thanks to Clive Sinclair and other genius nutters like that.

1980: Tim Berners-Lee begins thinking about creating the Web. Creates the notebook program, which links "nodes" of information.

1989: Tim Berners-Lee submits "Information Management: A Proposal", pretty much creating the theoretical WWW in the process.

1990s: PC's grow significantly more powerful, and significantly more popular. Internet commerce booms, Internet commerce busts.

1991: February 13th, Tim-Berners Lee sends an email.

1993: Marc Annderson create Mosaic, the first web browser.

2000: 7.4% of the world is on the Internet. Over 30% of UK households are online.

2009: 70% of UK households are online.

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the World Wide Web... Now even my cat has its own page. Bill Clinton