For most of the time since I started my Home Page in 1996 I have included an assertion like this most recent one:

Conviction: that the use of the World Wide Web and the Internet will continue to the point where Web Pages, such as this one, will become permanent sources of information, even outliving their authors.

Now I would like to explain why I do that.

Since the Internet (really the World Wide Web) began in the way we now see it and in spite of many start-up problems (such as computer viruses and worms, which continue to plague us!) it has never retreated from what it does well.

For me it is now the place to look first for information I would have previously looked for in a dictionary or encyclopedia. Nothing available can match its scope or its up-to-dated-ness.

When I want to see a war time movie, my local Blockbusters doesn't carry it anymore because "there is no demand for it". I have to go to a speciality video store.

But the World Wide Web gives up nothing once it has a hold on it. Everything is retained, forever!

Libraries are the same. What the great libraries have on their shelves they will "never" release. Only war can intervene, such as the treasures lost in the first days of the War in Iraq. Even in Germany in the Second World War, art works and books were moved out of libraries into obscure caves in obscure locations. The World Wide Web is like that, yet has another advantage. The documents it retains are not easily locateable for those wanting to destroy them or for accidental destruction. The "documents" are spread throughout computers in the world. There is terrific "Redundancy".

I realized early on that my Home Page could be up "for ever"! What I would need is to be assured that a family member would pay the modest bills to have it located somewhere. Even that was aided by the appearance of free webs-sites, such as "Freewebs.com". When I arranged for my own domain name - www.glaird.com - it did entail an annual charge, but not an onerous one.

I had the opportunity to make this work in practise, not theory. As I was older than my friend, David Lochhead, I hunched that I would be the first example. But when David died at age 63, it turned out that David's Home Page would serve as my first example. Immediately on David's death, with the permission of Marta, his wife, I took possession of David's Home Page files, and, with Ken Bedell, moved them onto the IRTC Home Page. There they remain to this day, and for as long as Ken, Marta or I (or our children and grandchildren) survive!

David Lochhead Tribute

My assertion is this: That this thing we call the "Internet" (World Wide Web), flimsy and precarious though it seems at times, will be seen increasingly as the best repository of the world's knowledge. And that this statement is a global as well as personal. That is, it will retain the great library treasures of the world, and also the contributions of individuals, such as David Lochhead and myself.

Gordon Laird, Vancouver, B. C. March 14, 2004.

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Updated to March 14, 2004