Food Websites

Appears in
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

By Andrew F. Smith

Published 2004

  • About
Long before there was a World Wide Web, there were just individual computers. If you wanted to exchange information from your computer with someone else’s computer, you first had to copy the data to disks, tapes, or punch cards, and then give them to the person using the other computer, who then repeated all of your steps in reverse. This was, by today’s standards, remarkably tedious but—as we did not know there was any alternative—we thought it was miraculous. Eventually, networks were invented, allowing computers to talk to each other directly. They had to be connected directly, “hardwired,” to other computers. Modems soon followed, permitting computers to communicate over telephone lines. Soon, networks were being connected to other networks all over the world.