Comments on: History of the Internet: 1957-2009

History of the Internet: 1957-2009

Surfin' Bird — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:07:32 -0800

History of the Internet is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

By: starman

starman — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:37:39 -0800

Stylish and informative.. thanks.

By: aetg

aetg — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:39:26 -0800

I find this video more interesting if I think of it as the internet teaching me about itself.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:41:33 -0800

Of course the guy with the English accent takes a detour to England. Where's Alohanet, huh? And please, the French? PICOL seems like a nice idea but I hope he gets more than 22 icons designed.

By: absalom

absalom — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:08:36 -0800

Man, I'm pretty far removed from the subject these days, but I found him sort of muddled and unclear, at least in the opening minutes. I don't know that someone with no base knowledge of the subject would really be able to follow it, but I'm willing to be wrong on that one. Also, he doesn't start talking about the difficulty creating a protocol that works between different computer systems until around the 6 minute mark. He should have started talking about the when discussing the IMP, since that was one of the major hurdles BBN had to deal with. GuyZero, the french come in around the 5 minute mark. I mean, I guess you have to be pretty bare bones at ten minutes, but there are still some stark omissions, depending on what you even mean by "internet."

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:23:59 -0800

To clarify: what I meant was I think that you can't really discuss the internet without discussing ethernet and, by extension, alohanet. SO I think that's an omission. But including that obscure thing (I forget what) that they attribute to some French team? The French belong nowhere in the history of the invention of the internet except in the side discussion of how Minitel slowed French adoption of dialup and WWW services.

By: absalom

absalom — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:36:18 -0800

GuyZero: Gotcha, I thought you meant they were not mentioned at all. I am in complete agreement.

By: ErWenn

ErWenn — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:30:13 -0800

The narrator and animation style remind me of a slow-spoken, less angry Zero Punctuation.

By: ErWenn

ErWenn — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:34:40 -0800

Or at least the beginning with the frustrated developers did.

By: parallax7d

parallax7d — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:39:27 -0800

You can't take your money with you!

By: parallax7d

parallax7d — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:40:10 -0800

whoops, wrong thread sorry! (metafilter, where adding in the ability to delete or edit a comment will never happen!)

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:46:12 -0800

i miss usenet's good days.

By: mrbill

mrbill — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:00:32 -0800

"Sorry, this video no longer exists"

By: mrbill

mrbill — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:04:59 -0800

And... NOW it works once I reload a couple times.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:58:41 -0800

I don't know that someone with no base knowledge of the subject would really be able to follow it I had minimal knowledge (I knew about ARPANET and that's about it) and I followed it pretty well. It annoyed me that the Brit doesn't know how to pronounce French (it's si-KLAHD, it doesn't rhyme with Pilates) and that he doesn't tell you when things were happening (I don't think he mentions a date between 1962 and 1990), but it was educational for me. As for the French stuff, the Wikipedia article makes it sound like Cyclades was pretty significant. Maybe they should have mentioned ALOHAnet as well, but that doesn't make Cyclades not worth mentioning.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:53:29 -0800

Oh that's what he was saying. I couldn't spell it at all based on how he pronounced it. Cyclades to me is more like a parallel evolution. Like how squid eyes are so similar to human eyes. Yeah, they're both eyes with similar structures but only one led to the painting of the Mona Lisa. Like every invention in the world, there were multiple people working on packet switching at the same time. That doesn't mean they all influenced the Internet. Similarly, Aaron Schwartz summarizes The Telephone Gambit in a recent blog posting. So Bell copied the telephone from Grey? That doesn't mean Grey had any real influence on the eventual development of Bell Labs. I'm really just nitpicking, many parts of the documentary were fine but it seems like the author goes out of his way to find tenuous European connections while ignoring more important stuff that was done by other Americans. The Internet is fundamentally an American invention (and as I non-American I say this without jingoistic posturing. it's simply true)

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:55:22 -0800

Fair enough, but as an American who by the nature of things tends to get heavily US-centric coverage of everything, I appreciate a little extra attention being paid to non-US stuff I might not otherwise know about. (That's why I like the Penguin Guide to Jazz: it has heavy coverage of non-US jazz that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of.)

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:33:38 -0800

At 1,548 pages (!!) the Penguin Guide to Jazz is probably going for a more complete approach to the topic at hand than a 5-minute animated short produced by an undergrad using open-source icons. Given five minutes, I would skip the esoterica about dead-ends in the development of commercial computer networks, i.e. X.25 and Cyclades. Although if this guy is going to write a 1,548 page book on the development of large-scale packet-switched networks, I will definitely buy a copy. (Also, I really wanted to like Tuna: A Love Story but man, that guy needs a better editor. Stop repeating yourself Mr Ellis.)