Truck Driving Schools

Global Driving

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Back in 1995, way before dot com mania hit the headlines, Drivers.com became one of the first publishing company web sites in the world (possibly the first). We were information providers. We liked the Web. We took to it like a duck to water.

PDE Publications is a small publishing company specializing in driving and traffic safety. In 1995, we were producing a newsletter for traffic safety professionals and we had published a couple of books on the topic--most notably Target Risk, a (then controversial) book about risk psychology. We were sellers of information, but a new spirit was abroad in the world of the Internet, a generous, pioneering spirit in which information was being contributed free by thousands of enthusiastic individuals. We decided to join in and we opened up Drivers.com.

In the early 1990s, there was very little information on the Internet other than scholarly documents and scientific information. The Internet had been around for a while (beginning as a U.S. Department of Defence project in the 1960s and developing into a global net in the '70s), but getting at the information required technical expertise that was mainly the preserve of the academic community, governments and the military. The World Wide Web (www) changed all that.

Basically, the World Wide Web was the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, a name that will surely go down in history as one of the movers and shakers of the 20 th century. Working as a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Berners-Lee was looking for a way to keep track of his copious notes and files, and for a way to link ideas in different documents to one another so that there were always connections, even between ideas and bits of information that at first seemed unrelated. He wanted to do this, not just on his own computer, but on other computers as well. The "hypertext link" was Berners-Lee's idea. By the end of the '80s it was reality. A word in one document could be "hotlinked" to another document on another computer on the other side of the globe.

Berners-Lee developed HTML ( HyperText Mark-up Language). This allowed people to code documents in such a way that text and images on a wide variety of computers could be displayed in a format readable by all. He also developed the fore-runner of today's web browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer as a means of displaying the new coded documents. On top of that, Berners-Lee developed the URL (universal resource locator), an addressing scheme that gives each web page a unique location or address on the Web.

Of course, these web documents had to be placed on computers that were part of the interconnected "world wide web" of always-on computers, available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. By the mid 1990s the web had become an "open house." Anyone could put up a document or "page" as part of the world wide web of linked resources.

A great new age of information sharing was born.

The wild west days

Back then it was like the pioneering days in the old American west. Individuals, groups, organizations striking out into the unknown, following ideas and ideals, populating the World Wide Web with everything from stories about the family dog to images of paintings, scientific reports, poetry, and personal viewpoints on just about everything. Today, the Internet is an incredible resource, an unlimited online library, dictionary, encyclopedia, and medium for commerce. It is, some say, the greatest development in human communications since the invention of the printing press 500 years ago.

PDE Publications contributed by putting up a large body of content in early 1995. We felt that the Web was a wonderful idea, and it needed content, so we put it up for free. In 1995, our book Target Risk, by Gerald J.S. Wilde, was likely the first book to be published simultaneously in hard copy and on the Internet.

Basically, when the World Wide Web exploded in popularity in the late 1990s it did so because the web, by then, had a wealth of information on it and rich pickings for the curious browser or "surfer."

When PDE Publications applied for the domain name 'Drivers.com' few people knew about or cared about domain names. Our Internet Service Provider (ISP) at the time tried to convince us that names didn't matter on the Internet, since computers related to numbers just as well as names.

Since then, great fortunes have been made, and lost, in the world of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The web has changed profoundly, and matured greatly since those early days.

The future

Here at Drivers.com we've carried on carrying on, survived the dot com crash, constantly improving, and now we're moving ahead. Our new site design is more attractive, easier to navigate, and, most of all, it allows us to greatly improve what we like to do best--the provision of information, and guidance to information, products, and services related to drivers and driving.

We have hundreds of articles on all aspects of driving and drivers--from auto driveaway services to behavior, traffic law enforcement, environmental issues, and traffic.

Our Driving Jobs Center has more than three thousand resumes and enables truck, taxi, bus, and all kinds of professional drivers and potential employers to make a connection electronically, at low cost and with little risk.

We continue to poke and probe at all the key issues related to drivers, their challenges and their problems. We think the individual driver is the key decision maker in the highway transportation system and we want drivers to be informed and educated.

Enjoy our new site.

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