There is an excellent online resource about what the Internet is and where it came from called Hobbes’ Internet Timeline (http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/). Here, Robert Zakon lays out the events that led to this tool in painstaking detail. The Global Internet Society also offers great insight on the history and future of the Internet (http://www.internetsociety.org/). Even though most people have only been aware of the Internet since sometime in the mid-1990s-not even twenty years yet- there are already people in the profession of “Internet Historian”, seeking to make sense of this phenomenon (http://www.nethistory.info/index.html).
The problem with Internet history is that it reads like a can of alphabet soup—The DOD started ARPANET with MIT and AT&T founded USENET and UUCP, and TCP and IEEE split in to TCP/IP to form a better communication network, and then CERN and CERF and CERT and EARN and even FIDO and a Gopher got involved. This was long before WWW, or AOL, or NAPSTER, or EBAY, or FB.
My recollection isn’t quite as formal. I was a big nerd in the 70s and 80s…well, I still am. My dad was what advertising agencies refer to as an “Early Adopter”, meaning he was always ready to consume the newest technology and so I was able to coattail on his computer curiosity.
I know we had boxes of flashing lights that we could program to flash on command, etc., as early as when I was in grade school in the 70s, but it was when I was just out of high school in the mid to late 80s that things starting taking off in the computer world. At the time there were no Internet service providers, no world wide web, no high speed….you had to dial in on a phone line to the computer you wanted to interact with. You could find the numbers in a mega magazine called Computer Shopper, which was the size of a newspaper and thick as a phone book. You could also access certain wider area services by dialing in to a local access line, such as one at the University of Akron, and use their server to access files on other educational and governmental servers.
Consider this, high speed Internet travels at about 10 megabits per second today, but back then we were talking 1400-14000 bits per second…SLOWWWWW. I got an array of modems, so I could host my own billboard service and shared code I wrote to modify games like DOOM and Wolfenstein. We nerds also had “conventions” were we all got together and played games and shared code.
The media ignored the Internet; it was just a bunch of kids to them. Industry and commerce ignored it since they hadn’t yet figured out how to sell stuff yet. Politics ignored it since it wasn’t mainstream and they didn’t realize the type of opinion and information that could be shared on USENET Newsgroups, which was really the beginning of the way the Internet has been used to form and foster subversion in the Arab world recently, and in other parts of the world.
Then Tim Berners-Lee at MIT perfected hypertext markup and invented the World Wide Web. Suddenly everyone in the world wanted to be on it and be seen, and make money. Once commercialized, the Internet became the most important communication tool ever—connecting not only person to person but person to world, and world to person.
As things fell in to place in the 2000s—ways to identify places, ways to find places, ways to search for info, ways to present info, etc.—now we had an unregulated playground where anyone could be a big company and show or sell whatever they wanted. No wonder that some of the biggest businesses online have come from pornography, gambling and the theft of others intellectual property. Good has also flourished – eBay lets you have a yard sale to the world, LinkedIn permits global personal networking, and Facebook and YouTube make everyone a star. I can do all of my holiday shopping without ever leaving the house (I did that last year), and I can talk to and see my daughter on a picture phone from Paris (Skype is wonderful).
My job wouldn’t exist without the Internet. Not only do I work for one of the biggest Internet Service Providers in the country, but my own position is writing copy for web delivered databases and building intranet sites.
As much as my position and other related jobs were created by this tool, I have to wonder how many other jobs are now defunct because of it. Think about bank tellers, brick and mortar store clerks, long distance companies, librarians, even educators…what is the future in those industries? And how many writers, artists, entertainers, and musicians aren’t able to continue their craft due to not being able to secure their product from theft online? Is this at least partially responsible for our current economic issues and unemployment?
I believe that one of the biggest hurdles for the future of the Internet will be how to regulate it and still foster creativity, without damaging the freedom of expression that needs to remain. Otherwise, the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades. :)
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