One of my favorite hobbies is called recreational mathematics. This is the kind of revelation that I can only offer in the pages of this magazine and other select locations, feeling confident and hopeful that there is a more receptive public here than, say, at a Christmas dinner conversation or at the pub.

Seventeen years is a long time in our industry. To give us an idea, Gmail appeared eighteen years ago, and in those days Google pledged not to be evil. Those were the days of AJAX web applications, of Prototype versus jQuery, of Ruby on Rails and script.aculo.us. Those were the times before Obama, before the MacBook Air, before the pandemic, before Google Chrome, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, before Android devices, before Docker and Kubernetes, before the Go programming language, before the V8 JavaScript engine, before the 2008 stock market crash, before Brexit, before SPAs, before Node.js and npm, before Star Wars Episode 7, before HD video was widespread.

What happened in the world in 1993? Czechoslovakia separated in a peaceful process into two countries. Bill Clinton became the 42nd president of the USA. A bomb detonated in the basement of the World Trade Center. Janet Reno became the first female Attorney General of the USA. Jiang Zemin became President of the People's Republic of China. The WHO declared tuberculosis a global emergency. A "fan" stabbed Monica Seles in the back. Crowds were protesting against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade. Andrew Miles solved Fermat's Last Theorem. Miguel Indurain won the Tour de France. The Maastricht Treaty took effect, creating the European Union. And finally, the Hubble Space Telescope took pictures…

In 2019 an extraordinary team of web development and design celebrities gathered in the offices of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, to build an emulator of the original web browser created by Tim Berners-Lee, known as WorldWideWeb.  This emulator is available online and, fittingly enough, runs on a modern web browser.