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May 12, 2006
Ethan Zuckerman's 90-Second Tour of Internet History
Notes from Ethan Zuckerman's lightning-fast overview of Internet history at the start of the Online Community panel. -andy
The Internet's been around since 1969, but email was invented four years earlier - people were using it to talk on a shared computer. Communication has been a fundamental part of the Internet even if it wasn't what the network was designed for. The first email list was created in 1975. Later, it was BBSes - Bulletin board systems, starting in 1978. By 1979, we had USENET, the precursor to all of today's Web bulletin boards. MUDS - multi user dungeons, were invented in 1979. Minitel - France's national interactive TV system - 1982. Minitel's chess game happened to have chat - the first instant messaging.
1990 - the World Wide Web first designed by Tim Berners Lee at CERN. '95 - geocities and tripod allow everyone to create their own homepages. Same year Ward Cunningham creates the first wiki. '97 - the first weblogs. 2001 marks the beginning of wikipedia.
So why now? All of this stuff has been around forever. It's because we've reached a critical mass of users. Two-thirds of Americans are online, hundreds of millions worldwide. Of course now.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at May 12, 2006 3:07 PM
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