By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin

The MAA website, and with it Devlin’s Angle, is 25-years-old this month, appearing for the first time on January 1, 1996. (The Web itself began just five years earlier, when Tim Berners-Lee put up the world’s first website on August 6, 1991.)

I had started writing monthly articles for the MAA back in September 1991, when I took over as editor of the Association’s monthly print magazine FOCUS. I stepped down from being FOCUS editor in January 1996, when the MAA first launched its website, and along with it Devlin’s Angle.

The world has changed a lot since then. In particular, the MAA website has gone through a number of overhauls, at least four by my counting.

These changes have left the Devlin’s Angle archives spread over four separate websites:

January 1996 – December 2003:
http://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_archives.html 

January 2004 – July 2011:
http://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devangle.html

August 2011 – December 2018:
http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com

January 2019 – present:
https://www.mathvalues.org/devlinsangle
[There is an overlap of articles, since the MAA populated the new site with material from the previous six months on the old site.]

Realizing that a quarter-century anniversary was coming up, I went back and looked at what I wrote for my first post on the new online magazine. What I found was an ominous early warning sign that the then-new online world had the potential to disrupt society in ways that the idealistic, future-minded techies who were the original developers of that e-world had never considered. (Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social media sites were still far in the future.) The reference to how human viruses can spread rapidly also has particular relevance today.

I will leave you to read that post in its original format, absent the MAA banner and my author photo, which have not survived the archival process. (Pity. I looked a lot younger then!) You will find it here:
https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin.html

Happy New Year to you all! And Happy Anniversary to the MAA website!!!