On her first tour of her freshman dorm at the University of California, Davis in the fall of 1992, neurophysiologist and science journalist Kirsten Sanford met an engineering student who talked to her about signing up for an electronic mail account—a term she had never heard before. At the time, the Internet was little more than green text on a black screen, and hardly anyone she knew used it. But Sanford was intrigued. “The idea that I could send messages immediately to people without having to stamp a letter was fascinating.”
By the time she graduated 4 years later, however, everything had changed. The World Wide Web had spread like wildfire. With new user-friendly browsers such as Internet Explorer and the now-defunct Netscape, pages could be embedded with images, music, and videos to present more visually ...
