Mike Edwards

We discuss some of the history and structure of the Internet, using historyoftheinternet.org as our guide.

• History of the Internet
• Telegraph
• Vannevar Bush
• Ted H. Nelson (1960)
• Hypertext
• interlinked media so complex it couldn't be written on paper
• the medium itself is important
• RAND Corp. (1964)
• communications network
• withstand a nuclear attack
• no central authority
• this is the essence of the Internet -- by design
• ARPANet (1969)
• 4 nodes
• Stanford
• Utah
• UCLA
• UCSB
• crashed on the G in login
• Email (1971)
• First Mailiing list (1975)
• First Spam (1978) - New Yorker
• First use of Internet (1975)
• Vint Cerf
• Usenet (1979)
• News groups
• alt.gossip.celebrities
• groups.google.com
• TCP/IP (1983)
• flexible
• any service can be put up on the net
• IP Addressing
• everyone gets a number
• numbers are like address in the real world
• DNS (1984)
• Handier than remembering the IP address
• like a shorthand for IPs, they just point to it
• WWW (1992)
• Tim Berners-Lee
• first web pages appear (August 6 1991)
• read/write web
• the first page
• Mosaic (1993)
• First web browser with images in the page
• First popular browser
• Big Launches on the Web (1995)
• Netscape
• eBay
• Amazon
• "Weblog" (1997)
• term coined in 1997
• arguably in existence for a while before that
• raises an interesting question--what makes a blog a blog?
• Early example of the read-write web
• Google (1998)
• Not the first search engine
• but makes use of hypertext in a novel way
• the algorithm
• wayback
• MySpace (2003)
• an online community?
• easy to create (bad) webpages
• Something GeoCities did back in mid-1995
• Geocities via the wayback machine