What's an Internet?

A gallon of gas cost $1.34. East and West Germany reunite. "The Simpsons" first appear on FOX TV. Desert Shield begins with U.S. troops in Kuwait. A hole in the Ozone Layer above the North Pole is discovered. The year?

It’s the same year Madonna tops the Pop Charts, and technology sees Tim Berners-Lee publish the first web page on the WWW... the Internet. It’s 1990.

It’s also the year that Disability Today Publishing arrived on the scene on a mission to change the world of disability with the medium of magazines. Alongside a couple of other start-up disability publications on the pioneering path, we kicked words like “handicap” to the curb - banned forever from our pages of new-found empowerment. We took on discrimination and stereotyping with reckless abandon.

Jump ahead two decades and our disability magazines are still hard at work and in good company with a bunch of like-minded others. But the things we write about have changed as dramatically as the songs atop the Pop Charts.

Hospital-issue wheelchairs from Everest and Jennings have rolled over to hip and edgy chairs from companies like Colours Wheelchair and Invacare Top End with their dance and tennis and all-terrain specialty models. TV telethons stepped aside for a new generation of inspiring actors, activists and athletes with disabilities. Turn out the lights, the pity party is over.

And the places we now profile are all over the map. From accessible African safaris to wheelchair-friendly San Diego, Chicago, New York and Toronto, for example, and from the high seas of cruise travel to mountain vistas and other natural world locales for the more adventurous.

And then there’s that “internet”, at first given the cold-shoulder, thought to be an adversary to the printed word. But now, an ally, an extension of the power of publications. Social issues are tackled with social media. Opinion polls and posts. Tips and tricks Tweeted every day. As the globe got smaller, the world of information for people with disabilities got bigger. Thank goodness for the worldwide web.

Enter the Disability Today Network. People, products and places at your fingertips 24/7. Combining the written word with the spoken, with flip-book webmags, videos, blogs, social media and more. Connecting consumers with disabilities coast-to-coast in an online village like no other.

As the vernacular of the day says: Join the Conversation. Share in the people, products and places that will re-shape your world, like it has ours. You know, on the Internet.

Oh... and how did I remember all that stuff about 1990? I didn’t. Found it on the Internet!

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Or email me at jeff@disabilitytodaynetwork.com.