MetaFilter posts tagged with history and internet

The Way we Were

Miko — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:10:42 -0800

The History of the Internet in a Nutshell Discovered indirectly via fellow MeFite john.c.herman

'Lo world

starman — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:26:48 -0800

Forty years ago today, Leonard Kleinrock and a team of engineers at UCLA connected to Stanford Research Institute and typed (an incomplete) message between the first two nodes of the Internet: "lo." Kleinrock tells the story. The first router. On packet switching. (All YouTube) Kleinrock interviewed by CNN, LA Times. Sign outside the historic room at UCLA. History of the Internet.

The Virtual Museum of Iraq

homunculus — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:55:43 -0800

The Virtual Museum of Iraq.

112211,1120

Kadin2048 — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:02:17 -0800

After 30 years of operation, Compuserve Information Service has shut down. Although Compuserve the brand lives on in a newer incarnation and as a dialup internet service provider, the service which was shut down Wednesday was the original: in recent years called 'Compuserve Classic,' it had its origins back in 1979 as a consumer-oriented sideline to Compuserve's core commercial offerings. Claimed to be the "first service to offer electronic mail capabilities" and "the first online service to offer real-time chat online," at its peak in 1995 it had more than three million members, each paying hourly rates to access the service. At least a few people were still using it, and Compuserve has indicated that members can continue to use their CIS user IDs to receive email through a newer interface. (Via HN)

300 baud of awesome in a wooden box

loquacious — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:47:03 -0800

This is what 300 baud looks like online today.

"The Internet is a web of networks."

william_boot — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:38:41 -0800

Sunday, February 28, 1993. A new word -- Internet -- makes its first appearance in The New York Times.

RFC 1

loquacious — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:59:58 -0800

Happy 40th birthday, RFC 1!

Final Edition

yiftach — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:49:50 -0800

Newspaper says goodbye via Vimeo. The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition today, after 149 years, 311 days in circulation.

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.

VF: How the Web Was Won

spiderwire — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:02:34 -0800

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. I just like this quote because it sums up my experience with all hackers-as-CEOs:

Jeff Bezos: When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables. We got packing tables the next day, and it doubled our productivity.

"Schools should continue to require library research so they can see how old folks used to Google stuff."

Kattullus — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:12:42 -0800

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.

about:mozilla

ardgedee — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:29:21 -0800

Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corporation! It was 1994, and the World Wide Web as we know it today was about to be born. Mosaic Communications didn't invent the web and didn't even invent the graphical browser. The Netscape browser and Netscape server were instrumental in commercializing the internet. mcom.com was one of the standard starting points for anybody on the Web, and this little slice of history can help the young'uns understand what the Web used to be like. Reconstructed from archived files for your benefit by one jwz, a task epic in the telling.

Edward Samuel's Illustrated History of Copyright

carter — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:49:00 -0800

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.

Death of a Browser, End of an Era

Chinese Jet Pilot — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 14:47:45 -0800

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?

salmonerd to nsynchottie503

growabrain — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:22:43 -0800

“Instant Messenger” performed by Nick Thune. (Found on the original blog your monkey called)

Revisiting The Economy of Attention

Chinese Jet Pilot — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:13:28 -0800

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?

CRAYON!

divabat — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 03:28:07 -0800

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]

The Future 'Just' Happened

feelinglistless — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 09:06:55 -0800

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.

Remember when email was the killer app?

majick — Thu, 18 May 2006 10:30:21 -0800

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.

ARPAnet

loquacious — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 01:23:36 -0800

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)

Cerfle

tommyc — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 03:38:04 -0800

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!

Virtual Museums of Canada: Cultural Cornucopia

Rumple — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 20:30:28 -0800

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.

Shirky: Spectrum as resource

freebird — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 12:52:42 -0800

A nice article on some of the engineering and economics aspects of WiFi, and the history of frequency regulation in the USA.

Quakers on the WWW

thomas j wise — Mon, 31 May 2004 08:38:19 -0800

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.)

tpoh.org — Thu, 24 Oct 2002 05:56:20 -0800

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.