Vanity Fair’s oral history of the Internet.
If you haven’t read this uber-feature already, do yourself a favor, set aside a little time, and imbibe.
“How the Web Was Won” uses small bits of narrative to link together lots of first-person anecdotes from seminal figures in the history of the Internet, including Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, Bob Metcalfe, Vint Cerf, Jeff Bezos, and Vinod Khosla.
The anecdotes — and the historical insights they convey — led me to wish that the feature was even longer, which is not something I can usually say about magazine journalism.
It also led me to notice, not for the first time, how new fortunes have been made in computing in every decade since the 1960s, and to wonder, not for the first time, where the next grand fortunes in computing and connectivity will be minted.
Here’s the link again: How the Web Was Won
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Of related interest:
- The Computer History Museum’s “Internet History” exhibit.
- Martin Dodge’s Atlas of Cyberspaces.
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(Image, “The Web Is Agreement,” by Paul Downey. It’s worth it to check out the Flickr page for the image to see the annotations.)
Category: History, Internet1 Comment so far
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Obviously my time to catch up but the next revolution is, IMHO, happening under our noses with the emergence of what I’ve taken to calling the Technomediatainment Industry where VoIP convergence is re-energizing the telecom sectors but generating Greek drama-worthy bandwidth wars:
Technomediatainment (Telecom): RIM, ATT, Sprint, Cable Wars http://tinyurl.com/6gwtnq
And the parallel and rapid evolution of the Content Wars - perhaps best exemplified by the iPod’s video capabilities triggering Disney to make its’ stuff dloadable and now represented perhaps by HULU - which I recommend checking out.
For that top of the stack you might consider this:
Technomediataiment (Content): the Revolution is HERE http://tinyurl.com/5szata
As it says - the revolution is here.