I bring a lot of my own memory and experience to the history in “It Was 20 Years Ago Today.† It’s fascinating because I can look back at events which I knew at the time were world-changing.  But, even more interesting, I can also look at events which were, on the day, not a big deal at all — yet over the course of time prove to be the heralds of transformation in our lives.  More than perhaps anyone could have imagined.
In August of 1991, there were examples of both kinds of events.  An attempt to overthrow the government of the Soviet Union failed. A physicist at a research lab in Switzerland told a group of computer scientists about a new networking protocol he’d worked out, and a Finnish student told fellow computer nerds about a new operating system he was developing.
We all knew, I think, that the USSR was on the way out.   A scant four months later, it ceased to exist entirely.  But did anyone even dream of the transformation those two technologies would work on the world?  For one thing, without the World Wide Web and Linux, you wouldn’t be reading these words.
Join me for all of this and more in new editions of “It Was 20 Years Ago Today,†coming this weekend.