Earlier this week we celebrated 15 years of the world-wide-web, today is apparently the 30th anniversary of the first spam mail, even though the name was only coined 15 years ago.

I can’t say exactly when I received my first spam mail, it was possibly at university at around the time the name was first used. But at the time it wasn’t so much of a nuisance as I didn’t receive that much e-mail.

Even when I started work in Germany, I don’t remember there being that much spam mail around, which was probably a good thing as the internet lines were still very much modem- or ISDN-based. On the other hand, perhaps that was why there was not such much of it around?

But I do remember that suddenly around the year 2000 there was a sudden influx of it – and it was a real pain at the time. With spam filters still in their infancy, it was a case of using every trick possible to block the mails from reaching the mail server. Most web-based freemail providers did not have spam filters, and as someone who picked up their mail on the move the slow GSM access combined with the number of spam mails made it a chore to download headers and then remove the spam before downloading the e-mails that I wanted.

After that both the mail programs and the providers woke up and started working on their filters. These days, seven years later, and I use a combination of provider- and program-based filters, as well as my own hand-written ones. As a result I receive very little of it, and the ones that I do receive do not make it to my mobile devices. I even advise other people on how to avoid it for a living!

In fact, I probably have more problems with unwanted telephone calls than with spam mails. And should anything get through after all, then I can always blog about it…

The BBC reported today, that the World-Wide-Web is celebrating its 15th birthday. This is because the first web technology was released by CERN on 30th April, 1993.

It’s not an event that I remember experiencing, although I know that I was in my second year at university and getting ready to go to Germany for my placement year, so I dug out my diary from that year to have a look.

Apparently I didn’t have any lectures on that day and stayed at home to do homework and revision, which I guess is not very exciting compared to the birth of the web!

I remember at the time using an information system called Gopher and my first contact with a web browser was with NCSA Mosaic in September 1994 when I arrived back at university for my final year.

It was then that I started to design web pages. My final year project for my computer science course was to design the website for the Department of Languages and European Studies, which included looking at the different technologies and where it was all going.

The site was basic by today’s standards, but it used an interesting feature of colour-coded links to show which pages were public and which were only available on the campus, as well as a separate colour for external links.

There were experimental audio files in WAV format and video files in Quicktime, as well as a selection of photographs provided by other students – often displayed with only 256 colours.

Many of the pages stayed online after I had graduated and have only been replaced within the last year years. I still have the source code to those pages, but you are unlikely to find them anywhere online now. To get some idea of how the site looked, there is a page of the main department site on archive.org which shows how the links were colour-coded.

I would have liked to have compared what I wrote back then about the future of the web with what has actually happened since, but although I have the project work backed up and readily available, I have been struggling to open the file containing my summary. It is another example of digital obsolescence as even with the wide variety of software and operating systems available to me I have not managed it yet!

I guess I will have to dig out the printed version of the project or return to the original PC that I wrote it on, providing it still works after all this time (and I was pushing it to the limit back then!)

The web has revolutionised the way that we work with and think about information, and back in 1995 when I was finishing off my project work I am sure that I would have written something about the forthcoming changes in peoples’ attitudes to working with the web and the availability of information.

But after all that has changed over the past 15 years, sometimes it is still the printed word that is easiest to retrieve.

About 14 years ago I had e-mail contact with Tim Berners-Lee – the man who had just created a thing called the World-Wide-Web. I was a student, and he was an internet pioneer. At the time, we both used the same type of PDA!

Today there is an interview with him on BBC News with a Q&A, on topics not unlike I get asked about myself.

So what’s my view on internet privacy?

Well, living in Germany we have fairly strict laws on such things. You can’t just have your e-mail address added to a mailing list – you have to give permission and it’s up to the owner of the list to prove that you gave it. Cold calling private households is illegal as well.

Over the years I’ve become a defender of such rights. I blog about unwanted e-mails and telephone calls and often try to follow how my personal data has got from one system to another.

And yet I am just as fascinated when sites such as Amazon recommend me items based on previous purchases, much in the same way I recommend products to my own customers.

Except of course, my recommendations are based on my knowledge of peoples’ requirements – Amazon does it automatically based on the data that they have saved about me.

There are many systems on the internet that are free to use for personal use, provided you accept their advertising, such as my favourite virus scanner.

But what would happen if my provider allowed me a discount for being allowed to process the web sites that I visited – or worse, made me pay a surcharge for not doing it?

In the case of a discount, I would have to think long and hard about it. I would certainly try to avoid any surcharge.

But being in Germany I hope that, like so many other things, such systems will have to be “opt-in” so that I won’t suddenly find myself viewing advertisements based on where I surfed to yesterday.

Sometimes having such strict privacy laws can be useful.