Vanity Fair has a typically excellent article out -- "How the Web Was Won," an oral history of the Web. Even if you're familiar with ARPANet, Metcalfe's Law, Pearl Harbor Day, the VC rush, whatever -- the story told by the often-animated people at the center of the whirlwind is an enlightening and entertaining experience. And for those of you don't know the history of the Internet, learn it! This is part of your heritage now.
posted on Jun 4, 2008 - View this thread

The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.

The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses: Defending the Library of Google, The Future in the Past and Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.
posted on Jun 1, 2008 - View this thread

Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corporation! It was 1994, and the World Wide Web as we know it today was about to be born.
posted on Mar 31, 2008 - View this thread

Edward Samuel's Illustrated History of Copyright A fascinating illustrated historical tour, looking at how different technologies have shaped how we think about copyright and intellectual property.
posted on Jan 31, 2008 - View this thread

RIP Netscape browser, 1994-2007. AOL, who acquired the groundbreaking browser as part of a $4.2 billion deal in 1998, announced the end today. Good-bye or good riddance?
posted on Dec 28, 2007 - View this thread

“Instant Messenger” performed by Nick Thune. (Found on the original blog your monkey called)
posted on Dec 13, 2007 - View this thread

The currency of the New Economy won't be money, but attention -- A radical theory of value. It's with great hesitation that I post an article that refers to the Internet as "cyberspace", but I found this article revolutionary when I read it almost ten years ago. Does MetaFilter prove it right after all these years?
posted on Apr 3, 2007 - View this thread

Before RSS and personalized aggregators such as Personalized Google and NetVibes, there was CRAYON, a service that allowed you to "CReAte Your Own Newspaper" by providing a page with links to chosen sources. [mi]
posted on Mar 28, 2007 - View this thread

The Future Just Happened A series of four BBC programmes about the internet from five years ago watchable online (via pre-broadband 56k real) that provide a snapshot of a time when AOL was 'at the heart of the new world', Marillion were releasing music through fan subscriptions and Monica Lewinsky was talking about how she didn't trust email anymore. Amazing.
posted on Jun 4, 2006 - View this thread

Email used to be the ultimate application of the Internet, and there are still some interesting artifacts of that left behind today: As a source of randomness Email Roulette (which we've seen before) is my favorite application of email. TPC Remote Printing Service, a free mail-to-fax gateway, is pretty useful in a pinch and is something of an Old Internet institution with a history predating the web. Nearly as venerable is the more frivolous Internet Pizza Server from the days when the very idea of making a purchase over the Internet was funny, and the idea of browsing the web via email didn't seem so peculiar as it does today.
posted on May 18, 2006 - View this thread

Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing (Google video) A fascinating 30 minute documentary about ARPAnet - the precursor to today's Internet. (Can you spot the real ubernerd mover and shaker at BBN? Hint: He wears no tie!) (via: all over the place)
posted on Mar 19, 2006 - View this thread

Vint Cerf, "father of the internet", joins Google! It seems Google is going from strength to strength. Not content with buying up the world's dark fibre, they've now wooed Vint Cerf to work for them as "Chief Internet Evangelist" (what a great job title!) Vint's interview is here, and information on his major cause: the need for more IPs!
posted on Sep 9, 2005 - View this thread

The Virtual Museum of Canada has funded or collaborated on almost 150 virtual exhibits, mostly relating to Canadian History and Culture. There is great diversity, among my favourites are Nk'Mip Nation Aboriginal Childrens' Art from the Inkameep day school (a welcome counterpoint to the residential schools tragedy), the historic re-photography and soundscapes of Montreal, Haida Culture documented , and also compared to Inuit Culture, Inuit (Eskimo) games and 3-dimensional (VR) sculpture, a history of the Canadian Trucking Industry, a splendid overview of Canadian documentary film making, Canadian design in the late 20th century, and the Shipwrecks of Vancouver Island. There is also a searchable image gallery. The only thing missing is a historical whodunnit or two (or three). All sites available in both French and English, and some in other languages too.
posted on Nov 25, 2004 - View this thread

A nice article on some of the engineering and economics aspects of WiFi, and the history of frequency regulation in the USA.
posted on Aug 16, 2004 - View this thread

Digital Quaker Collection Courtesy of Earlham College, the Digital Quaker Collection offers free access to "over 500 individual Quaker works from the 17th and 18th centuries." More historical texts, including many from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are available from The Quaker Writings Home Page. (Main link via Scribblingwoman.)
posted on May 31, 2004 - View this thread

The First Community Blog? Five years ago today, Caleb Donaldson pulled the plug on Geek Cereal, a social experiment that began on March 21, 1996. Some of the links don't work like they should anymore, but the calendar will get you to all the juicy bits. An interesting little time capsule. The site's demise is mentioned in this Ghost Sites 1997 obit, and in this virtual eulogy from Caleb's dad on MIT's website.
posted on Oct 24, 2002 - View this thread

Back in the day . . . Remembering a time when the BBS was king.
posted on Jun 1, 2002 - View this thread

RIP Jim Ellis. Jim was one of the co-founders of Usenet. Today's a sad day, between Michael's death and Jim's... Why is it that net pioneers die so young...
posted on Jun 29, 2001 - View this thread

JavaScript Style Sheets: the CSS that "coulda been". This brief read offers up an explanation as to why CSS support in Netscape 4.x is Quite Awful.
posted on Apr 13, 2001 - View this thread

Deconstructing
Joe Clark (a fellow Torontonian, no less) has provided food for thought in his "Deconstructing 'You've Got Blog'" screed. While Joe scores some valid points, I think he misses the mark in a few major ways. In the process, he comes across as cynical, and a bit wounded, too. [more inside]
posted on Nov 14, 2000 - View this thread

Internet To Be Bigger Than TV - UCLA Report "For the first time in the history of television, TV usage by children under 14 declined," recalled Cole. "Kids finally found something that was more interesting than TV. It was an epiphany moment for me." Download the report here.
posted on Oct 25, 2000 - View this thread

Al Gore and the Internet
A post to nettime from Vinton Cerf, someone who knows a little something about the development of the internet (he led the development of TCP/IP), giving Al Gore props for taking initiative for creating the Internet. Al never said he "invented" the internet. But he's had a lot of influence in creating the internet we all know and love.

I have no interest in toadying for Gore, but it does bother me how people parrot the misattributed quote, and seemingly have no desire to know how things really developed.
posted on Oct 2, 2000 - View this thread

Pseudo is Dead. Shocked, I tell ya, shocked.
posted on Sep 18, 2000 - View this thread

Yes, Virginia, there was life before the Internet...
...but nobody's bothered to archive it yet. Thanks to those wacky .edu's, there's a fair amount of historical data out there, but if you're hoping the newspapers who charge for archive "reprints" will have material from the '40s, the '60s or even the '80s, you're still better off going to the library and flipping through microfiche (bet that's the first time THAT word's been used on MetaFilter). I hesitated blogging this story here until I saw how the Internet History Timeline caught some people by surprise... Yes, even we MetaFilterers are sitting on the shoulders of Giants (and a few of us are old enough to remember "They Might Be Giants" as a movie starring George C. Scott).
posted on Jul 24, 2000 - View this thread

I wondered who invented the Internet. Some people would say Al Gore, but even after reading parts of the history of the Internet (first link), I can't figure it out. I think the "USSR" prompted us to do it when they launched Sputnik. Is this really the case?
posted on Jul 24, 2000 - View this thread

Mark your calendars: PBS is running a special called "Code Rush" in late March, about the hectic coding schedules that Netscape employees like Jaime Zawinski coped with in early 1998. It sounds like it's going to be good and will probably be similar to other stories about the formation of Netscape.
posted on Feb 10, 2000 - View this thread