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A Brief History of the Internet
Ant writes "'Many young people around the world use the internet every day, and yet they have no memory of the history that led to the creation of the global network. Many have no understanding of how or why the internet has developed. As part of out continuing efforts to combat ignorance around the world, The Lemon is proud to present this timeline...'"
On a related note, here is the history of Usenet. Unlike the story-linked-site, the Usenet site is a real history, and is in many ways funnier.
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
The Hobbes' Internet Timeline and the ISOC list of Internet Histories give much better coverage.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Seth Finkelstein has collected lots of good links on the topic.
Well, if Tim Berners-Lee had only held on to his "world wide web" then we'd probably all be speaking his name now... but we all know what happened to his empire, don't we:
"Cats becomes sole proprietor of all your base. Every Zig moved."
(Show me one person who has a usefull use for spreadsheets ... )
Accountants. Spreadsheets were not invented on a computer; accountants and other money-men had been using actual peices of paper with grids on them, called spreadsheets, long before the display of an Apple ][ was carved up into a little grid.
-IRC
-browser war
-opensource/unix/linux
-apache webserver
-wireless (802.11a/b/g)
anything else?
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HTML was definitely a huge advantage of WWW over Gopher and Tim had a much more intense commitment towards keeping the WWW "open" (to expansion AND keeping standards open) than Gopher's developers did.
The fact that the web was based on HTML pages that were easy to write was a huge advantage making content creation easier and also allowing for easy expansion of the standard later on that Gopher did not have. I think in that particular area the gap between creating content for Gopher and creating content for the web is almost comparable to the movable type versus plate printing -- HTML content, like movable type prints could be setup far more easily and quickly and required less knowledge to create.
For a much more complete history of not just the internet, but of interactive computing in general, read The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. This book centers around JCR Linklider and describes the efforts he and many other people made to invent networking, the mouse, the modern PC, and interactive computers in general.
From the Amazon review: "Waldrop interviewed dozens of contemporaries and examined reams of notes and primary sources to compose this massive biography of influence that stretches from MIT to the Pentagon to Xerox PARC and far beyond."
Many funny annecdotes are part of the story: Why is the mouse called "Mouse", the origin of "Requests for Comments", why is it called "Ethernet" and so on.
Strongly recommended!
One application that I happen to know about is our GPS system, whose satelites rely on the general theory of relativity to give accurate results. Read all about it here.
Perhaps ignorance about this kind of thing is a result of misunderstanding what exactly relativity is... my high school physics teacher told me that he didn't "buy it."
Is that the right-wing spin of the day? That Gore just "rode the wave" and that 400+ other legislators would have done the same thing?
Check this out. You might learn something.
Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet"
As you'll see, Gore made his first proposal to fund a universal version of the internet in 1986. How many other politicians, people not usually known for being up to date with technology, were pushing the internet in 1986? Were you?
This article puts 1986 into perspective:
"That Gore wrote about a national "data highway" as far back as 1986 is extremely significant. It is important to make clear the context of the state of computing at that time. The IBM PC was only four years old. The Apple II computer was still in widespread use. The number of hosts on the Internet numbered, as counted by Mark Lottor's Internet Domain Survey, was 5,089. Entire universities (such as Michigan State University) made their initial connection to the Internet in 1986. In order for Gore to make this kind of speech in 1986, he had to have been conversant with the thinking of computer scientists and Internet pioneers. Such pioneers included such as Vint Cerf, Steven Wolf, and Larry Smarr - then director of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA), where Mosaic would be born some seven years later."
Did you get that, bunky? Seven years before Mosaic. Is that what you call "riding the wave"?
Speaking of Vinton Cerf, who might be trusted to have an informed opinion on this, this is what he had to say about Gore:
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.
As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies t
But in the only sense that matters for a politition, he did create the Internet. Senator Gore (or rather some unnamed staffer) wrote the legislation that created NSFNET back when DARPA was chasing everyone without military connections off the ARPANET (resulting in the MILNET). Thus was born the backbone of the Internet. He also wrote the continuing legislation that funded the NSF backbone for the five or six years it took to become self-sufficent. This was no mean feat; contrary to the grandparent post that claims he was just riding a wave of support, there was a lot of opposition and cries of wasted taxpayer money. (Eventually those cries were right -- funding lasted a couple years longer than it probably needed to.) It wasn't until after Netscape's success that VCs started lining up with funding and the real "wave" began. The perception that the Internet was a desirable thing was quite uncommon thirteen years ago even if it seems perfectly obvious to us now.