Golly gosh. According to the Guardian of London, and -- because the Guardian is the "Guardian" -- as reprinted in my local newspaper, the internet is celebrating a 10th birthday. This very week!

"The 10th birthday of the internet as a mass phenomenon is rightly being celebrated this week to mark a decade since the explosive stock market debut of Netscape."

Since when did we start celebrating the internet on the basis of an IPO? Maybe electricity got invented by Enron?

But wait there's more. There's always more. Do a Google search on "Netscape IPO". There you will find dozens of other 'the web got started with the Netscape IPO stories'. There's a bunch of boilerplate stories on how Netscape begat the web. Pack journalism around a story is often triggered by good PR. I wonder who planted this seed?

Netscape was a tremendous enabling technology but the web was not born the day they went public.