The history of the internet
page under construction 🚧
I want to try to write a History of the Internet, from how the first networks came together, the WWW, the first browser, to how the popular internet culture we know today was formed. What was it like "surfing the web" in the 90's and early 00's, how it slowly got centralized into this landscape of walled gardens. a few key events and innovations.
A friend recently posed a question on our chat that made me think about this, in the old days everything seemed to change much faster and now it doesn't seem so, or is it just that we are getting older and don't notice? My answer was that yes, everything changed much faster then, the reason is because the internet was not institutionalized as it is now. Back then websites that seemed to dominate the internet popular culture only lasted one or two years and then became obsolete. I'm thinking of something like Napster. Now we have Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Google, that have lasted more than a decade being pretty much the gravity center of the web.
Does something like Bitcoin or The Silk Road enter into the history of the internet? Geocities, Myspace, Forums, chat rooms, email, Yahoo, Altavista, Usenet, irc, smartphones, blogs, torrents, memes, social media, censorship, podcasts, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Disruption, innovation, counter-culture and even a little illegality have been the heart and DNA of the Internet since its start, at least since it became part of the popular culture how we know it today.
The history of the internet is fascinating, complex, multifaceted. I want to focus at least partially on the counter-culture, the resilience. The things that have existed and continue to exist outside of the institutional Internet. How people have found ways to hack and circumnavigate regulations and constant attemps to centralize and control platforms and content.
Here I'm just starting to collect a few links here that i think will be useful.
https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/research/project-highlights/ncsa-mosaic/
This page will be linked to the main content only once it's completed and formated in a shareable form. Right now it's just a draft that I'm writing here (in my phone) because I don't work on my main PC during the weekends and evenings. But if you are here and you've read this far and are interested in how it turns out, you are also welcome to send me suggestions for what to include to ese_grobet@disroot.org