It took me almost a year, and a week off of work, to catch up on reading and finally get to Vanity Fair’s piece: How the Web Was Won: An Oral History of the Internet. And while I’m sure your reading list is as backed-up as mine is (well, was!), if you’re in this industry you really should read it. It’s a first-person account by many of the major players of the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
But in case you don’t, here’s a few choice quotes:
Paul Baran – inventor of packet switching (breaking up data into packets to reassemble on the other side):
I get credit for a lot of things I didn’t do. I just did a little piece on packet switching and I get blamed for the whole goddamned Internet, you know? Technology reaches a certain ripeness and the pieces are available and the need is there and the economics look good – it’s going to get invented by somebody.
On the decision by the Government to give the building of the hardware Interface Message Processors to Bolt, Beranek & Newman:
In a congratulatory telegram to the company, Senator Edward M. Kennedy referred to I.M.P.’s as “interfaith” message processors.
Leonard Kleinrock – member of the ARPANET Team, on the Internet coming on-line:
September 2, 1969, is when the first I.M.P. was connected to the first host, and that happened at U.C.L.A. We didn’t even have a camera or a tape recorder or a written record of that event. I mean, who noticed? Nobody did. Nineteen sixty-nine was quite a year. Man on the moon. Woodstock. Mets won the World Series. Charles Manson starts killing these people here in Los Angeles. And the Internet was born. Well, the first four everybody knew about. Nobody knew about the Internet.
Vint Cerf – co-designers of the TCP protocol on the invention of @ to identify people on a network:
A guy named Ray Tomlinson, at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, figured out a way to cause a file to be transferred from one machine through the Net to another machine and left in a particular location for someone to pick up. He said, I need some symbol that separates the name of the recipient from the machine that the guy’s files are on. And so he looked around for what symbols on the keyboard were not already in use, and found the “@” sign. It was a tremendous invention.
Marc Andreessen on creating the first browser:
It sounds obvious in retrospect, but at the time, that was an original idea. When we were working on Mosaic during Christmas break between 1992 and 1993, I went out at like four in the morning to a 7-Eleven to get something to eat, and there was the first issue of Wired on the shelf. I bought it. In it there’s all this science-fiction stuff. The Internet’s not mentioned. Even in Wired.
Jeff Bezos on early Amazon:
When we launched, we launched with over a million titles. There were countless snags. One of my friends figured out that you could order a negative quantity of books. And we would credit your credit card and then, I guess, wait for you to deliver the books to us. We fixed that one very quickly.
…and so on – the Morris Worm, The Browser Wars, the first e-mail used in a legal case (Jon Poindexter in Iran Contra) – read it. This history is compelling and important.