In 1994 my high school library hooked up a computer to the internet for the first time. A kindly librarian (as opposed to the other, much sterner, not-very-kind teacher librarian (life advice: be a kind librarian, and you may one day end up in a praiseworthy editorial)) let my friends and I access the internet, in exchange for shelving duties, and cleaning the overhead projectors, and stocktaking the many, many copies of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. In retrospect maybe we were exploited cheap labour, but we did not care, because we had access to the internet. Netscape navigator was still months away, Google four more years. Mark Zuckerberg was ten years old. Yahoo was still named “Jerry and David’s guide to the world wide web”. Steve Jobs still worked for NeXT computers. But we did not care, because we had Microsoft Works and HyperText Markup Language. Glorious HTML, which, together with a tab key and a dial-up modem noisily handshaking its bits and bytes, allowed us to explore the profound delights of the nascent net. Delights like sound clips from the Simpsons. And sound clips from Monty Python. And sound clips from The Goon Show. And a picture of Mars which took an hour and a quarter to download. And pi to ten thousand decimal places. Which we may or may not have printed and bound and added an ISBN and catalogued into the library’s collection. Ok, yes, I admit, we were nerds. But we did not care, because we had glorious HTML.
All of which is to say HTML is good. And JoHILA articles now come in HTML format, in addition to PDF format. Which is good.
Also, friends are good. And JoHILA has great pleasure in welcoming a new friend, Cassandra Gorton from Monash Health. Cassandra has come on board as an associate editor of JoHILA, and will be writing a regular feature on technology, starting with this issue.
Friends and HTML, what else is needed? Well, apart from medicine, irrigation, health, roads, cheese, education, baths, law, peace, and the Circus Maximus of course…