parking for dot com only

I've seen those reports of the 25th anniversary of web browser, Mosaic. The first common use browser, because it ran on Windows.

Back in those days, I remember sitting in the frequent traffic jams around San Jose looking at billboards and envisaging when adverts would feature web addresses.

Originally I used NCSA Mosaic with a self-installed Windows TCP/IP stack. Then along came Netscape which eventually became available as a retail product. The web had truly arrived when I symbolically bought the retail diskette copy of Netscape in a USA computer store. It had warnings in the service agreement about not exporting it, because it was classed as munitions.

Early days, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation was already thinking about anonymity, neutrality and the like, well before all of the Facebook malarky.

Jump cut to today. I've just been sitting in a supermarket car park and there's a whole row of spaces reserved for DOT COM vehicles.

Contrast to the planned merger of Sainsbury and Asda/Walmart. It makes me wonder like in those Californian traffic jams. Ongoing cannibalism of shopping options as consumers drift from bricks and mortar, via click and collect to request and deliver.