12. The Web and Security

With any luck, we two coauthors are still in the first halves of our lives. As relative youngsters, it's strange to be able to start talking like an old-timer. But old-timers we are, for we can remember the Dark Ages before there was a Web.

Yes, Virginia, there was such a time. Public networked interaction took place on such things as USENET newsgroups (all ASCII text). Indeed, there once wasn't even an "Internet"; and email via BITNET and UUNET required knowing not only your colleague's email address but also the route by which a message could get from your site to your colleague's site.

However, thanks to lazy physicists in Switzerland, we now have the World Wide Web. We could spend quite a bit of time on this topic; ...

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