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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...'"
Once upon a time, there wan an Internet. Along cam Slashdot... phut - the internet got slashsdotted.
The rest, as they say, is history.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
... I met a shady character in a bar, and he told me that one day machines would rule us with twisted-pair whips.
It took me years to figure out what he meant.
Damn those corporate drones in middle management.
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
That's a funny site :)
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
1981 - Bill Gates embarks on heroic and lifelong quest to piss off every person in America.
1992 - World-Wide Web released by CERN. Group suggests someone invent a web browser so people can use it.
Bill Gates gets a mention (although not a positive one) but Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web doesn't? How bad is that?
It amazes me that Berners-Lee isn't more widely acknowledged for his contribution to today's internet. Granted he's never been a man who's to court publicity, but he will go down in history as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.
Arguably, he's been as important to the information revolution as Gutenberg was to the printing one. I'm not saying that he created everything single-handedly, only that his work should be acknowledged.
Yes, I realise that the The Lemon timeline is meant to be jokey but shouldn't a guy who's made so much possible for so many - for geeks the world over to argue with each other over which edition of AD&D is the best, people who've never had a social life to order a bride without leaving their front rooms and teenagers everywhere to download more porn than their Dad's could ever have imagined - get at least a tip of the hat?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
Al, stop posting here.
Seth Finkelstein has collected lots of good links on the topic.
I always thought that the Internet was invented by Microsoft and shipped with Windows 95.
Summation 2
And if you were real lucky, you had a good selection in your local calling area.
Ah, those were the days...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
just a few examples:
... )
... by that time I stopped using Windos, but didn't 95 came out somewhere in the middle of 96 ?)
1977: email invented. most common message: "let me know when you are there so i can call you.
(Family archives show as #1: "did you get this [email]?" and "are you there ?")
1978: Spreadsheet, 10 years till anyone knows how to use them.
(Show me one person who has a usefull use for spreadsheets
1995: AOL, Compuserve, etc take off
(I canceled my CIS account in late 1995, after using it for quite a while.
Erm - shute, I wanted to, but I didn't....)
1995: Release of Windows'95
(Erm
1997: Internet Porn introduced to businesses. Worker productivity down 97%
('97? I could swear Admiral K. sold his stuff for websites long before that [ESCdd])
2001: Blogging invented.
(hey, my first lj-entry is Aug 29th, 2000 - and I joined the bandwaggon very late.)
ps:
semicolon-dash-closing bracket
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
1969: x10 proposes a world wide computer network capable of poping up advertisements on users workstations. The DOD shows interest and tags the name ARPANET on it.
1981: Lary Flint and other Porn big shots support the effort.
1982: IBM turns down an offer to control the new born ARPANET, they're too busy licensing C:\>.
1986: Buttered popcorn beats out Gummy Bears by 20% in the first ever international email survey. Thus spam is invented.
1989: Playboy releases first ever Playmate gallery in ASCII on Gopher.
1991: Al Gore changes the name of the project by inventing the term "internet". Later NCSA releases the first browser, mosaic.
1993: The warez pups populate the Internet with copies of Doom and give users a reason to get online.
1994: The motion picture "Hackers" captures audiences with its amazing 3d representations of the internet, thus VRML is invented.
1995: Windows 95 hits store shelves hyping Plug and Play. ISA 28.8's fly off the shelves.
1998: Windows 98 is released with an integrated web browser, courtesy of Microsoft, and everyone forgets who Netscape is.
2000: Slashdot posts a story about about how cool slashdot is, and is instantly slashdotted as people reload the page.
2002: Grandma finally gets it when you tell her the internet isnt on the AOL cd she got in the mail.
2003: Linux becomes THE buzzword, instantly making it the #1 os to brag about and will inevitably dominate the desktop forever. Resistance is futile.
2004: Since AOL decides not to port AOL 8 to Linux the huge ISP fails and Time Warner starts talks with X10 about new and improved "Popup Commercials" for Cable TV.
Of course I missed a few minor things, like how WAP became the dominant authoring language, IRC put AT&T and MCI out of business, and how SCO ranted and raved about nonsense until they were beaten by a giant penguin.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
If that something is a single event, then it must be fundamentaly different, and destroy the prior 'world': Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Marx' theory of class struggle (good and bad).
What did the Apollo moon landings destroy? Or climbing Mount Everest? Or the creation of the Olympic movement? Or Pasteur's work in medicine?
I'm sorry, but I don't see how something has to be destructive, even in the loosest sense of the word as you're applying it, to be either influential or historical.
Oh, and as for just who "invented" the television, well, that's a real can of worms you've opened there. Farnsworth? George Carey? W. E. Sawyer? Edwin Belin? Vladimir Kosma Zworykin? John Logie Baird? Denes von Mihaly? Take your pick.
Farnsworth's showed off his technology on September 7, 1927. Baird's first public demonstration (to the general public in a department store) was on March 25, 1925, and he had a working model a year earlier.
Of all the pioneers who can claim to have invented the television, Farnsworth's claim isn't the strongest. But, obviously, because he was American he's the one Americans credit.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
-IRC
-browser war
-opensource/unix/linux
-apache webserver
-wireless (802.11a/b/g)
anything else?
d035 7hi5 100k 1ik3 4n l337 5i6 2 j00 ?
A: The internet was invented. It was all text.
B: The web was invented. It had pretty pictures. Some people thought they could make money from it. They failed.
C: Spam and pop-ups.
The end.
The Internet is generally stupid
Americans do not understand irony.
Apparently the do not. Do you know what irony is? If you're claiming that The Onion is ironic, then I guess you don't.
I have a feeling you meant satire or possibly sarcasm, but you're probably too confused to figure out which.
Well, if Tim Berners-Lee had only held on to his "world wide web" then we'd probably all be speaking his name now...
No. If TBL had "held on to" the WWW, nobody would ever had heard of it, or him. One of the major benefits of the WWW is that it is open for anybody to write browsers, servers, or run websites. If TBL had ever tried to exert control, the WWW would have been dropped instantly. Licensing was one of the things that killed gopher.
No, he rode the wave. Saying something is happening does not mean you made it happen. A case of a post hoc ergo proper hoc argument, for you classicists out there.
Since its inception almost 30 years ago, the internet has been transformed from a primitive device for sharing thoughts and ideas, into a massive network where people pay to connect and read advertisements they don't want, while calling each other "asshats".
Sounds painfully like Fark.com to me.. and to a lesser extent, Slashdot.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
"A brief history of the future", J.Naughton, is a very good book on the origins of the Internet, with some even funny detail. Worth to be read (more than T.Berners-Lee book...)
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!
Before the Internet, computer users enjoyed frequent crashes, lockups, bizarre messages, infinite loops, and freezes that required the three-fingered salute.
Then along came the Internet, where everything was in HTML, which had none of these problems (the worst that could happen was a screen that looked bad).
But then along came Java and Java Script, and the Internet has "caught up", so now web pages are full of frequent crashes, lockups, bizarre messages, infinite loops. Once again computer users can enjoy when they were used to in the pre-Internet days. No longer are they in an environment free of the mistakes of bad programmers .
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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
what do you mean - "did not invent the internet"? Of course he invented it!
Haven't you heard it's all based on Al-Gore-ithms?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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.