History of the net

Vanity Fair had a series of articles recently on the history of the internet called How the Web Was Won:

Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough—network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser—inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology. Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.

Rico says he was, quite by accident, at ground zero for a lot of this. A high school friend who became a college buddy (and, while at CMU, helped Rico work on a design project that was a hand-held computer long before there were hand-held computers) came home and went to work for Xerox PARC. He got Rico in to bid on doing a computer case design (a laptop long before there were laptops) for Alan Kay, his boss. Didn't happen, but Rico did get to play with ARPANet in the late 70s. Then he went to work for Apple, of course, in 1985, at the start of the Macintosh Era. (We'll ignore the whole Rico-shoulda-whacked-Gates-when-he-had-the-chance story.) But let's remember that, fifteen years ago, until the launch of Mosaic, there really was no Internet. We've come a long way, baby...