Making Connections
Bob Metcalfe, recipient of the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his role in the development of Ethernet, briefly considered a career in tennis.
Making Connections Read MoreTag: History – Internet
How YouTube Created the Attention Economy
“Like, Comment, Subscribe,” a new history of the platform by Mark Bergen, makes the case that YouTube cracked the code for turning the desire to watch and be watched into money.
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A Year in Lockdown: How the Waves of COVID-19 Impact Internet Traffic
As challenging as the past year (and more) has been, the Internet has made it possible for many important aspects of life, work, and culture to continue.
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In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“The most interesting book ever written about Google” (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword.
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The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them. There were a lot of fascinating people involved, some ingenious and a few even geniuses. This is the story of these pioneers, hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs—who they were, how their minds worked, and what made them so creative. It’s also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.
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After 25 years, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are still working to democratize knowledge
Corporations continue to control access to materials that are in the library, which is controlling preservation, and it’s killing us.
After 25 years, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are still working to democratize knowledge Read More
A New History of Modern Computing
How the computer became universal.
A New History of Modern Computing Read More
Where computing might go next
The future of computing depends in part on how we reckon with its past.
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Everything VPN Is New Again
The growing number of end-user devices and a new layer of virtualization in datacenters has subtly but profoundly changed how the VPN abstraction fits into networking.
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The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America.
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China’s scary lesson to the world: Censoring the Internet works
“After two decades of Internet development under the Communist Party’s firm leadership, [China’s Internet czar, Lu Wei] said, his country had struck the correct balance between ‘freedom and order’ and between ‘openness and autonomy.’” – BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part 1 of 6 of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.
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Silicon Politics
Silicon Valley’s mythology of independence to the contrary, politics and government are absolutely central to its story.
Silicon Politics Read More
Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP
The HTTP standard, the language of web servers, was born humbly in 1990 as the hypertext transfer protocol. HTTP was basically just a few verbs—simple commands—that a browser said to a web server. The most essential of these were GET, which asks a server for information, and POST, which sends info back.
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An Interview with Leonard Kleinrock
Being surrounded by computers at MIT and at Lincoln Lab, it seemed inevitable to me they would eventually need to communicate with each other.
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In Debt to the NSF
Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Vinton G. Cerf
“We collectively owe much to the foresight and nuanced decisions taken by the leadership of [National Science Foundation’s] Computer, Information Systems and Engineering Directorates (CISE) and its Division of Computer and Network Systems.” [Without that, there would be no Internet as we know it today.]
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Hiding In Plain Sight – The Secret History of Silicon Valley
Presentation by Steve Blank, Dec. 2007 & Nov. 2008
Premise of “The Secret History of Silicon Valley” is that WWII was the First Electronic War and it was the wartime urgency combined with required secrecy to create systems to counter the threat of Nazi Germany that primarily lead to the development of what is known today as Silicon Valley. The point being that popular culture and history does not include this aspect in the history of Silicon Valley, but it is nonetheless important to know this history. Further, the projects that Mr. Blank outlines were conducted in plain sight.
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