Hi, my name is Victor Escobedo and I'm a Corporate Operations Engineer. I'm excited to spend the next of the lessons with you, before my colleague and friend Gian takes the reigns and wraps up the rest of the lessons on the Internet. Before we dive in though, I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself. My passion for IT began way back when I was nine years old and my dad brought home our first computer. He was a mechanical engineer and started using the computer to help him with his CAD work. This was the first time I was exposed to computers and later realized you can install new software on it, including computer games. As I tinkered with the computer, surely to my dad's dismay. I became more and more interested in how it worked and eventually started to open up the case and peek inside. I found pieces that could be removed and even some that shouldn't, learning through trial and error along the way. I couldn't really explain what it was, but I just found the mechanics of how it all worked together so fascinating. Looking back, these were the seeds that inspired my career. But you see, where I grew up, going to college and pursuing a career wasn't exactly talked about or heavily encouraged. I'm a first-generation Mexican-American, and there weren't a lot of people I knew pursuing a career in tech. My friends and family were mostly worrying about graduating high school and making sure they had jobs not really thinking about careers. My school didn't have the resources to offer many technical courses and even though my father was working in mechanical engineering, computers were a tool to him like a mill, ruler, or a hammer. My parents encouraged me to work hard and pursue computers but they couldn't really give advice about college or a career in tech. It's no real fault of their own, they just didn't have the necessary experience. When I decided to go to college, I decided to try my hand at computer science since it could feed my curiosity for how computers work at a more fundamental level. I realized that having this foundational knowledge really allowed me to understand some of the higher level concepts that were important in a career in tech. So while in school, I took on my first IT job for a local small company. I've been working in IT now for 12 years with the last 7 years being here at Google. I now work on managing deployments of large, internal IT projects for the company. Applying the knowledge I've picked up over the years in my initial IT help desk roles. To make sure I understand how I'm impacting our users and various support teams. Now that you know a little bit about me, let's dig into the Internet. The Internet made it possible for us to connect with almost anyone in the world. Before the Internet, you had to use paper maps and write down step-by-step directions to get where you wanted to go. If you wanted to see what your friends were up to, you'd have to call them, actually talk to them. If you wanted to learn something new, you had to go to a library and hope they have a book on the subject you wanted to learn. People didn't really discover new restaurants unless they heard about from someone else, or it was advertised. There was no Yelp or other website that rates restaurants like we have today. For some of us, life without the Internet seems unimaginable. We get it, it's become an integral part of our lives. In the next few lessons, you'll be learning about what the Internet is, how it came to be, and how it has impacted us both in negative and positive ways.