The History of the Internet …
… in Just One Newsletter
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, the first moonwalk and … the internet. Yes, it’s really that old.
To celebrate its anniversary, we have written a summary history of computing and the Internet. Through links. Because everything is else is generally TL;DR, particularly if you are reading this on your phone….
Round One: Hardware
- The first laptop was invented in 1981 and it looked like a Transformer.
- Believe it or not, the first smartphone was built at the height of Nirvana’s popularity, in 1992. I bet this is how Kurt called Eddie Vedder every night. Of course, he and Eddie had probably been using tablets for years by then, as the first commercial tablet computer was launched in 1989. Probably how they wrote their songs.
- The first Apple computer was made of wood. And Douglas Adams bought the first Mac. Both these facts are fun.
- The first mouse was also wood.
- Bring back wood computing!
Round Two: Software
- From the first email to Facebook’s Like button, Slate gives us 37 lines of code that changed anything. Curiously, the 20 GOTO 10 didn’t make the list.
- This year is also the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for the World Wide Web. In the proposal, he called it “Mesh,” which honestly sounds more modern than “World Wide Web.” It is a very lovely image, reminiscent of the rhizome.
- The only thing you know about Boca Raton, Florida, is that your grandparents probably live there. But it is also the birthplace of ctrl+alt+del.
Round Three: History and Geography
- Cleantechnica’s history of Silicon Valley is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of technology or urban geography. It shows how a very unique confluence of history and geography provided the set of conditions that Silicon Valley grew out of.
- There are now 1 billion more mobile that desktop users
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Drop me an email chris.m@svsg.co and avoid being left behind in the next great tech shift.
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