Internet History and Web History

 

... A must for someone researching  the evolution of the Net.

Jason Parkhill
The Historian and the Internet
Bibliography
College of Wooster, Ohio

yoav - this silly Web site. ... I don't want to know anything about the internet. I just wanna use it to my advantage....

If you've ever wondered how the Internet came into being then be sure to check this site out...

If you've never wondered how the Internet came into being then go anyway. You shouldn't be such a barbarian.

Hitch a lift with us on the information superhighway
by LineOne,  UK

...guide to the best networking resources on the world's biggest bookshelf -- the World Wide Web. History of the Internet. We all need it. We all want it. But how did it happen in the first place? Gregory Gromov provides a ... brief (one page) and comprehensive (nine page) history of the Worldwide Web before it was the Net we all know and love...

By Matthew Holt, NetworkWorld
June, 1997

Virtual Seminar for Teaching Literature
Internet Teaching
I. Some Basic Concepts
The History of the Internet
It is clear that the Internet is one of the most fashionable areas of computing. It is effecting all subjects in Higher Education, not only altering teaching opportunities because of its new perspectives on communication and dissemination, but also opening up exciting new resources for students and lecturers alike. For a history of the Internet readers should consult Gregory Gromov's The Roads and Crossroads of the Internet's History.
Humanities Computing Unit of Oxford University,

Oxford University
UK, 1996

Gregory R. Gromov's version is a fun to read and thoughtful look into the history of the Internet and the WWW.
The Maine Science and Technology Foundation
USM - Professional Development Center

Access the website designed by Gregory R. Gromov and published at ...
6. The primary document on the �View from Internet Valley" Homepage is "The Roads and Crossroads of  Internet�s History". Study all nine (9) pages linked to... as well as:
1. Road #1 "Information Age�s Milestones"
2. Road #2 "Internet at CERN: 1976 - 1990"
3. Road #3 "The 50 Years of the Hypertext Concept�s Evolution"
7. The team should write two or three questions regarding the history of the Internet... Write your questions based on Gromov�s website.

The Individual Learner Within American Culture, 
by Larry Garrett,
Social Foundations of American Education
Troy State University
Florida,1998

This is an entertaining (if potentially  confusing) account of Net history, part of a large on-line hyperbook called View from Internet Valley, written by a California Internet consulting company called Internet Valley. You should only read this after you've become familiar with Net history, because if you start here you may well get confused. But if you know Net history, this site will provide some fascinating insights and connections between events and people. Estimated Surfing Time: at least two hours.
Open Learning Agency : learning resources to support the K-12 education system in British Columbia, Canada,
1996

Read through your history- wonderful!
Dionne Dames
25 Oct 1998 11:04:42 -0800

Hi, I don't mean to be mean, but your website is very hard to understand. Next time you make a website about the history of something, don't jump around as much! You confused the hell out of me.
SCU Computer Lab
Santa Clara University
28 Sep 1998 17:01:07 PDT

This site is a genuine pleasure to use! Thank you.
Don Hester
14 Sep 1998 22:59:13 -0700

This is one of the Great Classic Websites. It's a history of the Internet and what led up to it, told in hypertext, both eloquently and chaotically, as strange in its own way as the Mel Brooks movie, History of the World, Part One. But it's one [REDACTED} of a lot more accurate than the Brooks movie. All Internet users, even those of you who just signed up for Web-TV or AOL last week and are still fumbling around, should check out this site.

When you jump into this online story, make sure you have a couple of hours free. It takes that long to read. Imagine a collaborative writing  project that tells you more than you ever wanted to know (and more than probably thought there was to tell) about the Internet, starting with the laying of the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic in 1858 (which was NOT a success, BTW).

You'll learn why the WWW Consortium [W3C] is based at a physics lab in Switzerland called CERN, instead of at a computer research center where you'd logically expect it to be, and why CERN doesn't even stand for the lab's real name -- in either English or French, along with lots of other neat factoids that'll come in handy if you ever find yourself playing Trivial Pursuit: The Internet Edition.

... I won't spoil the Al Gore allusion on this site ..., but I'm not convinced the  anectdote isn't spun by Democratic election  committee's
John
opencode@usa.net

AAAAAAAAAAAARGH! A lot of interesting information, and I guess the designers are trying to look like an Internet scrapbook, but really... I'll come back with Lynx and read it in plain text :)
Reeves Hall
reeves@earthling.net

Read The Roads and Crossroads of Internet 's History, Gregory R. Gromov, et al. This is a hypertext of nine main pages with side links. It is written as a kind of mosaic rather than as a straight narrative, including email questions and answers, fragments of interviews, and the like. It focuses primarily on the Web and hypertext over the Internet. As well, it plays with typographical design and page layout in curious ways.

by  M. C. Morgan
College of Arts and Letters,
Department of English
Bemidji State University, MN

... I believe that your site has some useful information but, quite frankly, I'm not even going to read it. The indiscriminate use of font sizes, font types, colors, and spacing gives mean absolute headache.

Whatever 6  year-old designed your site obviously does not know much about design...

Pauline Sanchez
8 Oct 1998

I am looking for resources on the history of the internet. I will not include any of your reportings. It seems like a great piece of work, although I cannot trust the reliability of it. You've misspelled and mistyped an amazing number of words throughout.

Are you a 12 year old?

Zachary Guidry
1 Oct  1998

I am very interested in the history of the net, that's why I came to your site, but the way you put it together is really annoying. <B>Bold</B> and <I>Italics</I> every other word really gets on your nerves. It would be a lot easier to read if you didn't overuse these. If you love those tags so much, save them for when only you are looking at them, because to everyone else, they are just showing how stupid you are.

Thomas Ammon ip245.etv.net
24 Oct 1998 10:19:10 -0700 (PDT)

"Don't panic..."

Now go explore and remember what you're looking for:
-an understanding of the history of the internet.
-the experience of exploring a topic through the internet.

Robert Melczarek
Introduction for EDU 606
School of Education
Troy State University, Dothan

My name is Tehmus Mistry and I am a lecturer of new media at Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland New Zealand.

I found your article " History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History by Gregory R. Gromov" through a search engine and started reading it. However, I found the presentation style extremely hard to read and this unfortunately has been the hindrance to reading the article and enjoying the articles content.

I can see the style and emphasis the article is trying to achieve.
However, with the

fonts, colors and layout used it makes reading
difficult. A more classical approach could achieve the same result with without making reading of the article a chore.

Since the article is recommended by many organizations as a good read
with regards to the history of the Internet, it would be appropriate to make the article an enjoyable read and less of an eyestrain.

If you feel you do not have the time to change the look and feel, I will be happy to assign the task to one of my students to change its look and feel.

Regards

Tehmus Mistry
30 Sep 1998 18:39:28 -0700

Great site very informative, interesting type usage...
Maurice Roach
20 Oct 1998 16:53:40 -0700

tnx for your wonderful history of the inet, by far the best I have seen
Tom Lamb
26 Oct 1998 06:06:39 -0800

Your Internet history website is freaky. The fonts and colors don't look like anything I've ever seen. I like it!
James Page

Thank you for telling the history of the internet in a manner that I could comfortably read, follow and understand. You guys were obviously in touch with your potential target audience.
Jens Morrison
13 Apr 1999 18:40:31

Thank you for the great site (and sight), friendly, easy to read and gives a new perspective on the Net
Jazz Veld
12 Apr 1999 14:38:31

I love the fonts and colours. Long may individuality live!!!! Well done on an interesting and informative piece of work
Simon Cockroft
12 Apr 1999 15:52:15

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History by Gregory Gromov is a nine-part history of the �Net posted by Internet Valley, Inc. While possibly not the first place in the pool where a non-swimmer should take the plunge, this colorful and quirky site can be a great resource where an informed �Net surfer can come and let hypertext do the walking and the inventors of the �Net themselves do the talking. Many visitors have found the eccentric choices of typeface and color to be disconcerting, but it�s worth clicking around here.

Kelly Ward, Public Health Library, UC Berkeley

What really led up to the development of the Internet? Why is it so important to us? How did it expand from its military origins into the electronic highway we know it to be? Gregory R. Gromov provides answers to these and other questions in "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History." Gromov presents an interesting look at the Net in the beginning, complete with timelines and milestones in not only Internet History but providing 
snippets of World History as well. His approach may seem confusing, even messy at first glance, but give it a moment, you'll see how he weaves the history of the Web together. It's creative, it's informative and it's well done--it's what the Web is all about. 

Carla Scarlett, BRIEFME.COM newsletter

  Vinton Cerf:
...the UCLA people proposed to DARPA to organize and run a Network Measurement Center for the ARPANET project...

A brief look from 1997: Annual percentage growth rate of data traffic on undersea telephone cables: 90 Number of miles of undersea telephone cables: 186,000 Source: WinTreese
1957: Sputnik has launched ARPA   President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the need for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik. 1957 - October 4th - the USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. 1958 - February 7th - In response to the launch of Sputnik, the US Department of Defense issues directive 5105.15 establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The organization united some of America's most brilliant people, who developed the United States' first successful satellite in 18 months. Several years later ARPA began to focus on computer networking and communications technology. In 1962, Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head ARPA's research in improving the military's use of computer technology. Licklider was a visionary who sought to make the government's use of computers more interactive. To quickly expand technology, Licklider saw the need to move ARPA's contracts from the private sector to universities and laid the foundations for what would become the ARPANET. The Atlantic cable of 1858 and Sputnik of 1957 were two basic  milestone of the Internet prehistory. You might want also to take a look on  the Telecommunications and Computers prehistory The Internet as a  tool to create "critical mass" of  intellectual resources  To appreciate the import ante the new computer-aided communication can have, one must consider the dynamics of "critical mass," as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take any problem worthy of the name, and you find only a few people who can contribute effectively to its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual partnership so that their ideas can come into contact with one another. But bring these people together physically in one place to form a team, and you have trouble, for the most creative people are often not the best team players, and there are not enough top positions in a single organization to keep them all happy. Let them go their separate ways, and each creates his own empire, large or small, and devotes more time to the role of emperor than to the role of problem solver. The principals still get together at meetings. They still visit one another. But the time scale of their communication stretches out, and the correlations among mental models degenerate between meetings so that it may take a year to do a week�s communicating. There has to be some way of facilitating communicantion among people wit bout bringing them together in one place. The Computer as a Communication Device by  J.C.R. Licklider, Robert W. Taylor, Science and Technology, April 1968. Online republish by Systems Research Center of DEC, p.29
The first visible results of Licklider's approach comes shortly:
1969: The first LOGs: UCLA -- Stanford
According to