<p>In the sands of human history two decades are no more than a speck, but it is the sum of life for the World Wide Web. The internet has been around in some form or the other since the early 1980s, but websites as we know them didn't come around till about 1993, by when, incredibly, Cricinfo existed. Before Twitter, before Facebook, before Google, before Hotmail and Yahoo, before iPhones and BlackBerries, and even before proper web browsers, there was Cricinfo.</p><p>Familiarity dulls our sense of wonder and we are prone to take for granted things that become part of our daily routine. But consider this. Before Cricinfo, the only way to find out what was happening in the game from a non-cricket part of the world was to put in an expensive international call. I have a friend who had his mother in Delhi post to the US newspaper clippings of each day's report after every Test. She once forgot to include the last day's report, which left him tormented for days.</p><p>As Simon King, who led a bunch of cricket samaritans in shaping and nurturing Cricinfo through the early years said: before Cricinfo, it was the dark ages.</p><p>So as we begin celebrating 20 years of the existence of the website that is now part of the game's fabric, we must first pause to give thanks. I speak here as a fan of the game and of Cricinfo long before I became a part of it: it is difficult now to imagine life without the site.</p><p><a href="http://www.espncricinfo.com/cricinfoat20/content/story/640399.html">Keep reading...</a></p>