Label |
Description |
Link |
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Timelines and Talks |
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| A brief history of the Internet (1999). By Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock, Lynch, Postel, Roberts, Wolff. | A succinct description of the pre-commercial days and the transition to commercialization by many of the key participants. |
http://arxiv.org/html/cs/9901011? | |||
| History of the Internet, with very accessible explanations of key facets. |
A project maintained by Bill Stewart, as an open source project. |
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| Interview with Robert Cailliau, CERN collaborator with Tim Berners-Lee on the invention of the web. | Some reflections on the occasion of his retirement. | ||||
| Internet history links, as provided by the Internet Society. | Internet histories of varous lengths, pursuing difference angles, from various perspectives. | http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/ |
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| Another history. | Very colorful. | ||||
| JC Thomson Jr. provides a narrative of the privatization. | An account of privatization | ||||
| Nerd TV, by Bob Cringely. | Interviews with many interesting inventors. Cringely has a talent for getting somebody to relax and talk. | http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/ | |||
| A Technical History of the Internet, given in 1999 at ACM Sigcomm | Presentations by 19 key participants in the early Internet. | http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/chris/sigcomm/t1/ | |||
| A timeline of Internet history. Part of online project on the History of Computing. | A very straightforward timeline. Not cluttered. | http://www.thocp.net/reference/internet/internet3.htm | |||
| The Machine that Changed the World: The World at your Fingertips | A very nice overview of the history of computing, with many interviews. The last installment is about the Internet. | ||||
| Living History of the Internet. | History of Bitnet, CSNet, UUCPNet, and alternatives. | http://livinginternet.com/u/ui_bitnet.htm |
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| Interview with Tom Valovic, author of Digitial Mythologies. | Quotable retrospective about the commercialization of the Internet and its impact. Valovic covered the Internet as a reporter for IDC at the time. | http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/67/Tom-Valovic-Digital-Mythologies-page01.html | |||
| Internet history at Quora | A series of questions put to participants at the site generated a large number of retrospective looks. Oral history through a web site. | http://www.quora.com/Internet-History | |||
| Online IT Degree: 50 Years of Information Technology | A site with links to fifty years of articles about IT use and employment. Compiled by Jacinda Frost. It is part of a general online site devoted to IT employment. | http://www.onlineitdegree.net/ | |||
Adoption |
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| Current Population Survey Reports on Internet use | Date on household use of the Internet for the mid 1990s. | ||||
| NTIA reports | Description of CPS surveys. | http://www.ntia.doc.gov/reports/anol/index.html | |||
| Global adoption | Larry Landweber's maps of global adoption and connectivity of the Internet from the 1990s. | http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~lhl/maps/ | |||
Company profiles |
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| Netcom | Wikipedia entry on Netcom | ||||
| PSINET | Wikipedia entry for PSI | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSINet | |||
| UUNET | Wikipedia entry for UUNET | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUNET | |||
| Portal Software | Wikipedia entry for Portal software | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_Software | |||
Historical Documents |
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| Ed Krol's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet (1987) | Essential reference guide at the time. | ||||
| Bill Gate's 1995 memo titled "The Internet Tidal Wave." | At eight pages and single spaced, it hardly deserves the title "memo." Widely credited as the point at which Gates changed his mind about the Internet and the Web and altered the strategic direction at Microsoft. | http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_exhibits.htm, Exhibit 20. | |||
| Tim Berners-Lee's first web page | It is pretty simple by modern standards, but the FAQ page gives a good sense of what the WWW was trying to do. | http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html | |||
| Early history of web. | WWW history up until 95. | ||||
| History of W3C. | WWW consortium history. | ||||
| Account of an early (first?) ISP | JC Thompson Jr. talks about his experience as an ISP. | ||||
| Web pioneers at the Internet Archive | A collection of early web pages, nicely displayed by the Internet Archive. | http://web.archive.org/collections/pioneers.html | |||
| Apache's history | A living document designed to record the origins of Apache | ||||
| US National Broadband Plan, March, 2010 | This is a historic document, albeit not a historical one. But it is possible to learn a great deal of history from it. Several of the chapters provide detailed assessments of the network today. The footnotes also cover just about everything. | http://download.broadband.gov/plan/national-broadband-plan.pdf | |||
| Pictures of MAE East | A wonderful little web site about MAE East and its history. Includes a few pictures. | http://cryptome.org/eyeball/mae-east/maee-birdseye.htm. | |||
| Dedicating the site in Arlington | The city of Arlington was the home to DARPA when DARPA first commissioned the work that led to the Internet. Here is an account about the dedication. Bob Cannon maintains this blog. | http://barlington.blogspot.com/ | |||
| A set of emails exchanges in 1992-93 about html and browsing | This set of emails, organized by subject thread, shows the conversations between Tim Berners Lee, Marc Andreesen and others. It is a useful documentation of the outlook they shared during the moments when Moscaic was first being developed. | ||||
Historical essays |
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| The Internet and American Business, Edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi | A collection of essays (including one by yours truly) about the Internet in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Looking at recent events through historical lens. | http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11468 | |||
| Craign Partridge and the technical history of email | Published in the Annuls of the History of Computing | http://www.ir.bbn.com/~craig/ | |||
| Tom Van Vleck on the history of email | Discussion of the history of email | ||||
| Brad Templeton on the 25 year anniversery of Spam | Spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam.... | http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/spam25.html | |||
| The Evolution of ARPAnet email, by Ian R. Hardy. | Social history of email until late 1980s. | http://www.ifla.org.sg/documents/internet/hari1.txt | |||
| The impact email work done at The Rand Corporation in the mid-1970’s, by David Crocker |
Observations and reflections from an early pioneer on the advances and inventions that led to email and where they led. | http://www.bbiw.net/recent.html | |||
| History of email from the livinghistory web site. | History of email from variety of persectives. Very accessible. | http://www.livinginternet.com/e/e.htm | |||
| Interviews. | Interviews with pioneers from the computer industry, as conducted by the Charles Babbage Institute | ||||
| A technologist considers why and how adaptable systems beat perfect designs | Shirky is a provocative technology writers with a flair for the zinger. The opening is particularly catchy. He lists all the technological things seemingly wrong with the Web's design, then goes on to argue why those attributes made it attractive to use and evolve. | ||||
| "Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data" | By Danah Boyd. A very insightful talk about the changing norms and ethics for privacy as large data sets enable more insight. | http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/WWW2010.html | |||
Historical quotes |
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| netlingo.com | Wild ducks | http://www.netlingo.com/word/wild-ducks.php: Wild ducks: Former IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson, Jr., wrote, "In IBM we frequently refer to our need for 'wild ducks.' The moral is drawn from a story by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who told of a man who fed the wild ducks flying south in great flocks each fall. After a while some of the ducks no longer bothered to fly south; they wintered in Denmark on what he fed them. In time they flew less and less. After three or four years they grew so lazy and fat that they found difficulty in flying at all. Kierkegaard drew his point: you can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again. One might also add that the duck who is tamed will never go anywhere any more. We are convinced that any business needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them." Also see this letter to the editor from 1989 in the New York Times. |
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| Speech by Reed Hundt | Hundt was chairman of the FCC from 1994 to 1997. An utterly fascinating retrospective speech, given in early 2010. | http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/flash/CBSPlay-append.html?video1=centers/CITI/lunch-speaker_3-11-2010.flv | |||
| Interview with Steve Case | The former CEO for AOL answers the question: "What factors led to the bursting of the Internet bubble of the late 90's?" | http://www.quora.com/What-factors-led-to-the-bursting-of-the-Internet-bubble-of-the-late-90s | |||
Historical statistics and interpretations |
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| Andrew Odlyzko | Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies provides many Internet traffic statistics | http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.html | |||
| Internet Statistics | Links kept by the Internet Society | ||||
Maps |
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| Chris Harrison | World Internet maps | http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/ | |||
| Chris Harrison | Other cool visualizations, including Wikipeida, and other statistics. | http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/visualization.html | |||
| Bill Cheswick | Internet maps. Became part of Lumeta. | http://www.cheswick.com/ches/map/ | |||
| Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin | Altast of Cyber Space | http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/atlas.html |
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| Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin | From their book. | http://www.kitchin.org/atlas/contents.html | |||
| Telegeography | Lots of professionally done maps | http://www.telegeography.com/maps/index.php | |||
| Young Hyun at CIDA | Go to the end of the presentation | ||||
| Tom Downs and Shane Greenstein | Density of supply of commercial ISPs in the 1990s | Fall 1996, Spring 1997, Fall 1997, Spring 1998, Fall 1998 (the last one appeared in Time Magazine). | |||
| The Internet Mapping Project | What does the Internet look like to you? Many contributions. Mostly an amusing diversion. Occasionally profound. | http://www.kk.org/internet-mapping/ |