The Atlantic cable of 1858 and Sputnik of 1957 were two basic  milestone of the Internet prehistory. See also: Telecommunications and Computers preHistory

The Internet as a  tool to create "critical mass" of the 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.

The  visible results of Licklider's approach comes shortly ...

1969: The first LOGs: UCLA -- Stanford

According toVinton Cerf,   the UCLA people proposed to DARPA to organize and run a Network Measurement Center for the ARPANET project...

Around Labor Day in 1969, BBN delivered an Interface Message Processor (IMP) to UCLA that was based on a Honeywell DDP 516, and when they turned it on, it just started running. It was hooked by 50 Kbps circuits to two other sites (SRI and UCSB) in the four-node network: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

The plan was unprecedented: Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data.They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor:

"We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI...,"
Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L and we asked on the phone,

- Do you see the L?
- Yes, we see the L,
 came the response. We typed the O, and we asked:
- Do you see the O.
- Yes, we see the O.

Then we typed the G, and ... the system crashed...

Yet a revolution had begun".

 

It took Bob about a year to get everybody far enough along to demonstrate a bunch of applications on the ARPANET. The idea was that we would install a packet switch and a Terminal Interface Processor or TIP in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel, and actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ....

The demo was a roaring success, much to the surprise of the people at AT&T who were skeptical about whether it would work.

By Vinton Cerf

 

About one-two years after the first online demo of  how "actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ...." (Vinton Cerf) the NET became  really   busy  especially "every Friday night":

Around about 1973 - 1975 I maintained PDP 10 hardware at SRI.
I remember hearing that there was an ARPANET "conference" on the Star Trek game every Friday night. Star Trek was a text based game where you used photon torpedos and phasers to blast Klingons.  I used to have a pretty cool logical map of the ARPANET at the time but my ex-wife got it. (She got everything but the debts.)

By Bob Bell,  DEC Field Service.

 

Logical map of the ARPANET, April 1971

ARPA Timeline:

... as Tim Berners-Lee and other Web developers enriched the standard for structuring data, programmers around the world began to enrich the browsers.

One of these programmers was Marc Andreessen, who was working for the NCSA in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.

In January 1993, Andreessen released a version of his new, handsome, point-and-click graphical browser for the Web, designed to run on Unix machines.

In August, Andreessen and his co-workers at the center released free versions for Macintosh and Windows.

In December, a long story about the Web and Mosaic appeared in The New York Times...

The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun,
By Gary Wolf, Wired 2.10

In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers.  A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher.

In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million then suddenly noticed that the  Web might be better than sex.

In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape...

Ether Microsoft and Netscape open some new fronts in escalating Web Wars, By Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld, August 21, 1995, Vol. 17, Issue 34.

Meanwhile -- between all these 3 generations -- a lot of historical scale events happened.
Eric W. Sink clarifies some of them:

Life in the browser wars was a unique time period for me in my career...

I started work on Spyglass Mosaic on April 5th, 1994. The demo for our first prospective customer was already on the calendar in May. ... Yes, we licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA (at the University of Illinois), but we never used any of the code. We wrote our browser implementations completely from scratch, on Windows, MacOS, and Unix.

... Netscape didn't even exist yet, but things happened fast. Just a few weeks after I started coding, Jim Clark rode into town and gathered a select group of programmers from NCSA. Mosaic Communications Corporation was born. It was interesting to note that certain people on the NCSA browser team were not invited to the special meeting. I can still remember hearing about how ticked off they were to be excluded. Champaign-Urbana is a very small town.

Spyglass had the legal right to the "Mosaic" trademark. A few tantrums and lots of lawyering later, MCC changed its name to Netscape.

We thought we had a nice head start on Netscape. We had a really top-notch team and we moved the rest of our developers over to browser work quickly. We were ready to compete with anybody. But Jim Clark was, after all, Jim Clark. His SGI-ness knew how to work the advantages of being in Silicon Valley. He provided his young company with lots of press coverage and very deep pockets.

We decided to approach this market with an OEM business model. Instead of selling a browser to end users we developed core technology and sold it to corporations who in turn provided it to their end users. We considered ourselves to be the arms dealer for the browser wars. Over 120 companies licensed Spyglass Mosaic so they could bundle it into their product. Our stuff ended up in books, operating systems, ATM machines, set-top boxes, help systems, and kiosks. It was an extremely profitable business. The company grew fast and ours was one of the first Internet IPOs.

Along the way, we got involved in the standards process. In fact, I became the chair of the IETF HTML Working Group for the standardization of HTML 2.0. I learned a lot through this experience. In May 1994 I went to the first WWW conference in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee took me aside and shared his plans for a World-Wide Web Consortium. It didn't take too long for the W3C to become the venue for HTML standards discussions. Eventually this was A Good Thing. Both Netscape and Microsoft became active participants in the W3C HTML Working Group. Any group which didn't have their involvement was doomed to irrelevance.

For much of 1994, it seemed like we were ahead of Netscape. Shortly after we released our 2.0 version, I remember one of the Netscape developers griping about how their schedule had been moved up by six months. We smiled because we knew we were the reason. They had not been taking us seriously and they were being forced to do so.

But Netscape was running at a much faster pace. They got ahead of us on features and they began to give their browser away at no cost to end users. This made Netscape the standard by which all other browsers were judged. If our browser didn't render something exactly like Netscape, it was considered a bug. I hated fixing our browser to make it bug-compatible with Netscape even though we had already coded it to "the standard". Life's not fair sometimes.

We won the Microsoft deal. I suppose only the higher echelons of Spyglass management really know the gory details of this negotiation. I was asked to be the primary technical contact for Microsoft and their effort to integrate our browser into Windows 95. I went to Redmond and worked there for a couple of weeks as part of the "Chicago" team. It was fun, but weird. They gave me my own office. At dinner time, everyone went to the cafeteria for food and then went back to work. On my first night, I went back to my hotel at 11:30pm. I was one of the first to leave.

Internet Explorer 2.0 was basically Spyglass Mosaic with not too many changes. IE 3.0 was a major upgrade, but still largely based on our code. IE 4.0 was closer to a rewrite, but our code was still lingering around -- we could tell by the presence of certain esoteric bugs that were specific to our layout engine.

Licensing our browser was a huge win for Spyglass. And it was a huge loss. We got a loud wake-up call when we tried to schedule our second conference for our OEM browser customers. Our customers told us they weren't coming because Microsoft was beating them up. The message became clear: We sold our browser technology to 120 companies, but one of them slaughtered the other 119.

The time between IE 3 and IE 4 was a defining period for Spyglass. It was clear that the browser war had become a two-player race.

- Even with our IPO stash, we didn't have the funding to keep up with Netscape.
- What was interesting was the day we learned that Netscape didn't have the funding to keep up with Microsoft.

For the development of IE 4.0, a new Program Manager appeared. His name was Scott Isaacs and I started seeing him at the HTML standards group meetings. At one of those meetings we sat down for a talk which was a major turning point for me and for Spyglass. Scott told me that the IE team had over 1,000 people.

I was stunned. That was 50 times the size of the Spyglass browser team. It was almost as many people as Netscape had in their whole company. I could have written the rest of the history of web browsers on that day -- no other outcomes were possible ...

       "Memoirs From the Browser Wars" by Eric W. Sink.

According to Gary Wolf, "Andreessen also left the NCSA, departing in December 1993 with the intention of abandoning Mosaic development altogether. He moved to California and took a position with a small software company. But within a few months he had quit his new job and formed a partnership with SGI founder Jim Clark.

"At the NCSA," Andreessen explains, "the deputy director suggested that we should start a company, but we didn't know how. We had no clue. How do you start something like that? How do you raise the money? Well, I came out here and met Jim, and all of a sudden the answers starting falling into place."

In March, Andreessen and Clark flew back to Illinois, rented a suite at the University Inn, and invited about half a dozen of the NCSA's main Mosaic developers over for a chat. Clark spent some time with each of them alone. By May, virtually the entire ex-NCSA development group was working for Mosaic Communications. 

Andreessen answers accusations that corporate Mosaic Communications "raided" nonprofit NCSA by pointing out that with the explosion of commercial interest in Mosaic, the developers were bound to be getting other offers to jump ship. "We originally were going to fly them out to California individually over a period of several weeks," Andreessen explains, "but Jim and I said, Waita second, it does not make much sense to leave them available to be picked up by other companies. So we flew out to Illinois at the spur of the moment."

Since Mosaic Communications now has possession of the core team of Mosaic developers from NCSA, the company sees no reason to pay any licensing fees for NCSA Mosaic. Andreessen and his team intend to rewrite the code, alter the name, and produce a browser that looks similar and works better.

The Anti-Gates

Clark and Andreessen have different goals. For Jim Clark, whose old company led the revolution in high-end digital graphics, Mosaic Communications represents an opportunity to transform a large sector of the computer industry a second time. For Andreessen, Mosaic Communications offers a chance to keep him free from the grip of a company he sees as one of the forces of darkness - Microsoft.

"If the company does well, I do pretty well," says Andreessen. "If the company doesn't do well" - his voice takes on a note of mock despair - "I work at Microsoft."

The chair of Microsoft is anathema to many young software developers, but to Andreessen he is a particularly appropriate nemesis...

As I ( ) reviewed my notes from interviews with Andreessen, I was struck by the thought that he may have conjured the Bill Gates nemesis out of the subtle miasma of his own ambivalence. After all it is he, not the programmers in Redmond, Washington, who is writing a proprietary Web browser. It is he, not Bill Gates, who is at the center of the new, ambitious industry. It is he who is being forced by the traditional logic of the software industry to operate with a caution that verges on secrecy, a caution that is distinctly at odds with the open environment of the Web."

The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun,
By Gary Wolf, Wired 2.10

There are two ages of the Internet - before Mosaic, and after. The combination of Tim Berners-Lee's Web protocols, which provided connectivity, and Marc Andreesen's browser, which provided a great interface, proved explosive. In twenty-four months, the Web has gone from being unknown to absolutely ubiquitous.

A Brief History of Cyberspace, by Mark Pesce, ZDNet, October 15, 1995

Bill Gates,  "...an Internet browser is a trivial piece of software. There are at least 30 companies that have written very credible Internet browsers, so that's nothing..."

The world according to Gates By Don Tennant, InfoWorld Electric, Jan 4, 1996.

"The most important thing for the Web is stay ahead of Microsoft."

Steve Jobs. Wired, February 1996, p.162

Microsoft may still be No. 2 in the Internet race, but it's rapidly closing the gap. What's more, Microsoft has forgotten more about PR and marketing than Netscape ever learned.

The contrast between the two companies was highlighted the day after Clark induced mass sedation when Microsoft's group vice president, Paul Maritz, wowed the crowd with the kind of polished, four-star presentation that the Redmondians seem to be able to do with their eyes closed.

Just like his boss, Maritz promised a lot of stuff that's still not here. But he generated excitement and energy and buzz. The upshot was to create the kind of halo effect that will pay dividends when it comes time for developers and corporate shoppers to make their buying and investment decisions. ....

Of Silicon Valley and Sominex, by Charles Cooper, PC Week, June 5, 1996.

 

Slate Magazine, June 26, 1996:  Is Microsoft Evil?
Mark Andreessen: I don't think it's a matter of good and evil --  Microsoft is a a competitor, and a smart one. Jim (Clark) and I both think it's important to point out what Microsoft is doing in various areas, since they are very good at using FUD [fear, uncertainty, doubt] to attempt to paralize the market.

Why Bill Gates wants to be the next Marc Andreessen, Wired, 3.12, p.236.

"God is on the side of the big battalions." said Napoleon.  Very few times in warfare have smaller forces overtaken bigger forces...  

 Netscape's Jim Barksdale, Wired 4.03 March 1996

 

December, 1995: i-Pearl Harbor

"Pearl Harbor Day." Time Magazine reported it when Bill Gates declared war on December  7, 1995...  By Jeff Sutherland

February, 1996: 2-year Prediction

Steve Jobs: We have a two-year window. If the Web doesn't reach ubiquity in the next two years, Microsoft will own it. And that will be the end of it. 

Wire, February 1996, p.162

June,  1996: "How many ...?"

Question : Netscape has certainly come on awfully strong.
Bill Gates: How many software developers do you think they have?

 The world according to Gates By Don Tennant, InfoWorld Electric, Jan 4, 1996

 

The turn-point in the Browser's War
The Web Browser market share dramatically changed for a couple of month:
 

Month	Netscape Navigator	Microsoft Internet Explorer
May-96	83.2%	7.0%
Jun-96	78.2%	8.3%
July-96	72.6%	15.8%
Aug-96	62.7%	29.1%

Data source: Intersй Corporation.

 

October, 1996: How much?

X-Sender: bney@mail2.quiknet.com
To: view@netvalley.com
From: Bob Ney
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 18:24:41 -0700

. . . . .
As an ISP, I want to give my customers a software package for their use. I contacted Netscape.

- They said they would let be customize and repackage their product, if I committed to buy 2500 the first year at $17 each.

I said OK, I can do that.

- Then they said, great please send your check for 50% of the moneys due.

That's $21,250. As a small ISP I dont have that available without dipping into my reserves.

I am then contacted by Microsoft and was told they would send me this really nice customization kit, which will build a release for Win95, Win NT, Win3.1 and install Explorer 3, Netmeeting, a commercial TCP dialer and stack. And it has a automated user sign up server built into it.

It will build a CD Rom image, if I want to distribute that way.
It configures with a wizard in about 5 minutes.
It's seamless and a really good piece of software and installer.

I said that it sounded great, how much?
- No charge. Distribute it all you want to your customers.
Have fun.

Microsoft is such a monster company that they can drop multi millions into development of a product package that they will give away.

Netscape on the other hand actually wants to make a bit of money on their product.

Thinking of myself first, I took the Microsoft software.
So will most other ISP's...

Bob Ney, QuikNet, Inc. Sacramento CA

 

Netscape Navigator  market-share historical trend:

50 years of HYPERTEXT concept's EVOLUTION
The Foundation of World Wide Web  Science

Hypertext Timeline

1945: Vannevar Bush (Science Advisor to president Roosevelt during WW2) proposes Memex -- a conceptual machine that can store vast amounts of information, in which users have the ability to create information trails, links of related texts and illustrations, which can be stored and used for future reference.

"As We May Think " This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly... Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Vannevar Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.


The Vannevar Bush's hyperlink concept:


Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.

With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.

It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency.

The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library.  It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do.

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.  It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk...

On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.

Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him...

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior...

By Vannevar Bush - As We May Think - The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945



1965: Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext

By 'hypertext' mean nonsequential writing - text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen.

Ted Nelson, Literary Machines

 

1967: Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System ...

The first working hypertext system was developed at Brown University, by a team led by Andries van Dam.  The Hypertext Editing System ran in 128K memory on an IBM/360 mainframe and was funded by IBM, who later sold it to the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center, where it was used to produce documentation for the Apollo space program.

The Hypertext Editing System (1967) and FRESS (1968) ,  by dr. P.M.E. De Bra

1981: Ted Nelson conceptualizes "Xanadu", a central, pay-per-document hypertext database encompassing all written information ...

The words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" were coined by my friend Ted Nelson in a paper to the ACM 20th national conference in 1965, before I (Andrew Pam) was even born! Although I had come across occasional articles Ted had written for Creative Computing magazine, my first exposure to his legendary Xanadu project did not occur until 1987 when I purchased the Microsoft Press second edition of his classic book Computer Lib / Dream Machines... , which outlined his idea of a "docuverse" or universal library of multimedia documents.

As an avid science fiction reader, my imagination had already been captured by this idea of a universally accessible computer storage and retrieval system as presented in the 1975 novel Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke... But here was someone actually involved in trying to create such a system. I immediately sent off a US$100 donation to Project Xanadu to reserve a Xanadu account name, and also purchased the 1988 edition of Ted's self-published book Literary Machines... and the Technical Overview video describing the Xanadu project in detail...

By Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia

All the children of Nelson's imagination do not have equal stature. Each is derived from the one, great, unfinished project for which he has finally achieved the fame he has pursued since his boyhood. During one of our (Gary Wolf) many conversations, Nelson explained that he never succeeded as a filmmaker or businessman because "the first step to anything I ever wanted to do was Xanadu."

Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry.

It has been in development for more than 30 years.

This long gestation period may not put it in the same category as the Great Wall of China, which was under construction for most of the 16th century and still failed to foil invaders, but, given the relative youth of commercial computing, Xanadu has set a record of futility that will be difficult for other companies to surpass.

The fact that Nelson has had only since about 1960 to build his reputation as the king of unsuccessful software development makes Xanadu interesting for another reason: the project's failure (or, viewed more optimistically, its long-delayed success) coincides almost exactly with the birth of hacker culture.

Xanadu's manic and highly publicized swerves from triumph to bankruptcy show a side of hackerdom that is as important, perhaps, as tales of billion-dollar companies born in garages.

Among people who consider themselves insiders, Nelson's Xanadu is sometimes treated as a joke, but this is superficial. Nelson's writing and presentations inspired some of the most visionary computer programmers, managers, and executives - including Autodesk Inc. founder John Walker - to pour millions of dollars and years of effort into the project.

Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate.

By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings.

And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed to save the world.

The Curse of Xanadu, by Gary Wolf, Wired 3.06


In the poem "Kubla Khan", by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a "magic place of literary memory" appears and is called Xanadu. The Xanadu vision of Ted Nelson was to create a unified literary environment on a global scale, a repository for everything that anybody has ever written.

Ted Nelson and Xanadu, by Paul De Bra

 We call the whole system of publication "open hypermedia publishing" because anyone can link to, and re-use, materials of any kind throughout the network.

We believe that Xanadu Open Hypermedia Publishing is the publishing medium of the future, combining all forms of media -- text, graphics, audio and music, video, simulations, data structures -- into tomorrow's new information world.

By  Ted Nelson. Xanadu: The Information Future.

If you think you're living in a revolutionary period now, wait till you start getting unsolicited e-mail from the Bolsheviks or Mao, or find yourself on Catherine the Great's home page. World Wide Web will sound like an awfully modest enterprise. You laugh?  Go ahead. They laughed at Galileo...  Not to mention the Internet.

Philadelphia Online:Philadelphia Inquirer : Books, November 1996


 

  Roads and Crossroads of the Internet History. By Gregory Gromov

Chapter 6: Living History of Hypertext
Theodor Holm Nelson: The Fate of Thinking Person in Silicon Valley 

1960. It occurs to me that the future of humanity is at the interactive computer screen, that the new writing and movies will be interactive and interlinked. It will be united by bridges of transclusion (see below) and we need a world-wide network to deliver it with royalty. I begin.

.  .  .  .  .

February, 1988. Autodesk buys the Xanadu project, which has been bundled into XOC, Inc. Nelson gives up the trademark.

LATE 1988 the program designed in 1981 is finished (and dubbed 88.1), then set aside, to begin work on a MUCH FINER design-

August, 1992. Autodesk drops the project and gives us carfare. Our heroes find themselves out in the street.

Interesting Times Number Three, October 1994,
Theodor Holm Nelson , Mindful Press, 1994

 

Nelson's life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip Johnson's glass house from windows...  He has been at work on an overarching philosophy of everything called General Schematics, but the text remains in thousands of pieces, scattered on sheets of paper, file cards, and sticky notes.

Curse of Xanadu, by Gary Wolf,  Wired

Theodor Holm Nelson: A retort to Gary Wolf's "Curse of Xanadu" in Wired Magazine.  

Magazine: Nelson's response to the Web was "nice try".
Nelson: This is a pretty seriously out-of-context quote. I have great respect for the Web and great personal liking for Tim Berners-Lee.

 

..after the Advisory Committee meeting of the WWW Consortium, in Tokyo, June 1997. This one [photo] was made by Hakon Lie at dinner. 

It shows me [Robert Cailliau], sitting between Tim Berners-Lee and Ted Nelson.  Tim and Ted are clearly engaged in a serious debate about some hypertext phenomenon behind my back, while I'm discussing philosophy with Hakon, who was sitting opposite me and took the photo."

By R. Cailliau: "Tim, Robert and Ted"

I was right for some wrong reasons or whether I was right,  ...
Ted Nelson, Wired, 3.09

The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Peter Cochrane, British Telecom Laboratories


Where World WideWeb Went Wrong
by Andrew Pam"

Lack of transparent support for mirroring
Lack of an underlying distributed file system
Lack of bivisibility and bifollowability
Lack of versioning and alternates
Limited support for metadata
Limited support for Computer Mediated Communication Cyberspace/"Hyperspace" as a pervasive user interface metaphor
Limited support for transclusions
Transcopyright - the Xanadu solution for business on the Net - New financial instruments for the new media

 

Nelson: Trying to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger...

"The problem is how to clean up the mess that is
strewn around us.... We have the World Wide
Web with all sorts of marvelous new conceptual
methods proposed every month, all of them
contradictory," said Nelson.

"I come from a slightly different position [than the
Web], where we have long presented and
implemented an integrated solution for all of these
problems in parallel, which will eventually prevail
once people understand it," Nelson said.

Hypertext Guru Has New Spin on Old Plans, Wired, 17.Apr.98.by James Glave



Xanadu Timeline:

1960 Ted Nelson's designs showed two screen windows connected by visible lines, pointing from parts of an object in one window to corresponding parts of an object in another window. No existing windowing software provides this facility even today.

1965 Nelson's design concentrated on the single-user system and was based on "zipper lists", sequential lists of elements which could be linked sideways to other zipper lists for large non-sequential text structures.

1970 Nelson invented certain data structures and algorithms called the "enfilade" which became the basis for much later work (still proprietary to Xanadu Operating Company, Inc.)

1972 Implementations ran in both Algol and Fortran.

1974 William Barus extended the enfilade concept to handle interconnection.

1979 Nelson assembled a new team (Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene, Roland King and Eric Hill) to redesign the system.

1981 K. Eric Drexler created a new data structure and algorithms for complex versioning and connection management.

The Project Xanadu team completed the design of a universal networking server for Xanadu, described in various editions of Ted Nelson's book "Literary Machines" ...

1983 Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. (XOC, Inc.) was formed to complete development of the 1981 design.

1988 XOC, Inc. was acquired by Autodesk, Inc. and amply funded, with offices in Palo Alto and later Mountain View California. Work continued with Mark Miller as chief designer. ..

1992 Autodesk entered into the throes of an organisational shakeup and dropped the project, after expenditures on the order of five million US dollars. Rights to continued development of the XOC server were licensed to Memex, Inc. of Palo Alto, California and the trademark "Xanadu" was re-assigned to Nelson.

1993 Nelson re-thought the whole thing and respecified Xanadu publishing as a system of business arrangements. Minimal specifications for a publishing system were created under the name "Xanadu Light", and Andrew Pam of Serious Cybernetics in Melbourne, Australia was licensed to continue development as Xanadu Australia.

1994 Nelson was invited to Japan and founded the Sapporo HyperLab...

By Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia

 

The Xanadu database makes it possible to address any substring of any document from any other document.

This requires an even stronger addressing scheme than the Universal Resource Locators used in the World-Wide Web.

Every single byte (character) in every document (in the whole world) needs a unique address.

Xanadu will never  delete any text.

It keeps a permanent record of all versions of every document. This is necessary because someone may have created links to parts of a specific version of a document, which may no longer be present in later versions of that document.

Xanadu uses a sophisticated versioning system that requires only one version (the current one) of a document to be stored completely. By keeping a record of the changes made to the document, other versions can be generated on the fly.

Ted Nelson and Xanadu, by Paul De Bra

 

...epic tragedy:

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era.

Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.

Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing -

a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair.
The amazing epic tragedy.

The Curse of Xanadu, Wired 3.06, 1995,  by Gary Wolf

 

Wolf calls the general idea that we need freedom and availability of information to avoid disaster a "very hackerish assumption."

 Perhaps. But it is an ideal I believe in, bound up with the ideals I learned from the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school. Ironically, that ideal seemed to be what Wired stood for. Wolf's piece is a perfect example of such a disaster.

Ted Nelson,Wired, 3.09

 

Nelson and his colleagues of Project Xanadu pioneered in issues of distributed hypermedia, distributed documents and evolving edit systems. It can be argued that HyperCard, World Wide Web, Lotus Notes and much of "multimedia" all derive from this work.

Nelson's theories of software center around arbitrary Virtuality, which he divides into conceptual structure and feel. He condemns "metaphors" as presently used, and instead advocates the design of deep new construct logics

Ted Nelson, Be-In, 1996

 

I continue to hold exactly to my original vision, that transclusive hypermedia will be the publishing medium of the future, under whatever brand name.

There are far more varieties of interactive media than anyone has yet tried; but I believe that open transmedia - unique in power to aid understanding and to solve the copyright issue - represents a vital singularity in the great family of media cosmologies; until this is disproven, I continue to stake my life and career on it. If I am right about the centrality of transclusion to the media of the future, it may all have been worth it, and we will see who understood media design after all.

Ted Nelson, Wired, 3.09

 

One profound insight can be extracted from the long and sometimes painful Xanadu story: the most powerful results often come from constraining ambition and designing only microstandards on top of which a rich exploration of applications and concepts can be supported. That's what has driven the Web and its underlying infrastructure, the Internet.

Xanks and No, Xanks, Wired, 3.09 , by Vint Cerf

 

 

  Roads and Crossroads of the Internet History. By Gregory Gromov

Chapter 8: Growth of the Internet - Statistics

Simplicity almost never happens by itself;
it must be designed.
Ted Nelson

 

The First Decade of the  Internet History:   Brief Stats Story

Date	Hosts	Domains*	WebSites	WHR(%)**
Jul 01	126,000,000	30,000,000	28.200,000	22.0
Jul 98	37,000,000	4,300,000	4,270,000	12.0
Jul 97	19,540,000	1,301,000	1,200,000	6.2
Jul 96	12,881,000	488,000	300,000	2.3
Jul 95	6,642,000	120,000	25,000	0.4
Jul 94	3,212,000	46,000	3,000	0.1
Jul 93	1,776,000	26,000	150	0.01
Jul 92	992,000	16,300	50	0.005
Jul 89	130,000	3,900	-
Jul 81	210
1969	4
© Gregory Gromov 1996 - 2002

Data sources: Network Wizards (US), Dr A D Marshall (UK),
and some of the Netvalley estimations

*/ The total number of the all types of Domains (commercial -- com.; non-profit organizations -- org.; educational  -- edu.; ... etc.)
**/The WebSites to Hosts Ratio (WHR):

WHR estimates the percent  of content active  part of Internet community.  By other words, WHR reflects what is the percent of Web surfing people  are trying to  become the  Web authors by creating their own Web sites. So we ( - G.R.G) consider the WHR as a creative temperature of  Web

 

 

Growth of the Internet: Statistics

DATE	NUMBER	% POP	SOURCE
August 2001	513.41 million	8.46	Nua Ltd
August 2000	368.54 million	6.07	Nua Ltd
August 1999	195.19 million	4.64	Nua Ltd
Sept 1998	147 million	3.6	Nua Ltd
November 1997	76 million	1.81	Reuters
December 1996	36 million	.88	IDC
December 1995	16 million	.39	IDC

World Total	513.41 million
Africa	4.15 million
Asia/Pacific	143.99 million
Europe	154.63 million
Middle East	4.65million
Canada & USA	180.68 million
Latin America	25.33 million


Compiled from: Nua Internet Surveys

 



Source: Global Internet Statistics (by Language)

  Roads and Crossroads of the Internet History. By Gregory Gromov

"Subjects." There are no subjects."  Everything is deeply intertwingled.
  ~ Ted Nelson

Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 21:21:34 -0400
From: BRUCECLYN@aol.com
To: view@netvalley.com
Subject: Comments to :View from Internet Valley
 

Your site is riveting history - but, what are the practical differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web?

You describe a continuous evolution of a system and I, for one, don't know the practical differences between the manmade information links whose terms are commonly bandied about in the press.

 Please respond - enquiring minds want to know.

Sincerely,
Bruce D. Clyne

 

Dear Bruce,

... The Internet is a global networks' system that consist of the millions of local area networks (LANs) and computers (hosts).  So it's a tech system that is working according to the basic computer science concepts and rules. It was developed 25 - 30 years ago.

The WWW is only one of the ways of practical implementations of the Internet.

Some of the other ways are the following ones: gophers -- the dispersed system of menu driven subject oriented data bases; ftp -- the remote files' exchange system; email systems, and so on...

The WWW (that was born 5 years ago) is a method (and system) that provides the members of the Internet's community with historically new opportunity to create and permanently develop the global field of the texts (as well as images, animations, sounds, etc.), all parts of which are able to crossconnect with each others.

In other words, the WWW is a fast growing (millions of authors are adding new pages every day) global field of text that consist of billions of words (as well as sounds, images, animations, ... etc.) all (!) parts (every of billions of WORDs) of which are able to realtime crossconnect and interact with each others.

As it was mentioned by Alberto Cavicchiolo, "the network is not a computer science concept, but a linguistic concept".

I often quote this definition, even though I do not fully agree with it.
From my viewpoint the network itself is definitely a computer science concept. The Internet is a computer science concept as well as biological concept.

... the Web (!) only "... is not a computer science concept, but a linguistic concept".

So my definition of the Web is the following one:

The Web is a method (and technology) of the global WORDS' fields dynamic crossconnection and interaction (again, I mean the words, as well as all other communication symbols: the images, animations, sounds and so on...).

The Web uses the Internet to store, locate and connect the WORDS as some of the others more tradition methods of the WORDS's connection used the stones, skins, papyruses, papers, phone, recorders, radio, TV ...

The phone teleconferences, some of the radio and TV shows and tele-reportages were partly using the Web's basic hyperlink approach.

The hyperlinks concept itself was known for thousands of years . For instance, some of the Bible stories include different source stories inside the main story, and those source stories contain  some other source stories and so on...

All those well known attempts to use hyperlinks concept had one technical disadvantage: they were based on the static, fully prediscribed scenarios of the WORDS' crossconnections.

There were strong crossconnection levels limits, link's delay time limits, and so on..

The WWW has broken any limits for any WORDS' crosconnections.

After that the "chain reaction" of crossconnections was launched...

For instance, according to the Sun Microsystems' statistics "the total number of the Internet's sites crossconnections more than doubled every month". (Sun press-seminar , January 1995, Mountain View, CA).

. . .
Once again, thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,
Gregory Gromov

The Net is a unique creation of human intelligence.

...  the first intelligent artificial organism.

...  represents the growth of a new society within the old.

...  represents a new model of governance.

...  represents a threat to civil liberties.

...  the greatest free marketplace of ideas that has ever existed.

The Net is in imminent danger of extinction.

The Net is immortal.

By Henry Edward Hardy The History of the Net,
Master's Thesis, September 28, 1993

 

The growth of the Net is not a fluke or a fad, but the consequence of unleashing the power of individual creativity. If it were an economy, it would be the triumph of the free market over central planning. In music, jazz over Bach. Democracy over dictatorship...
    by Christopher Anderson. The Economist Newspaper Limited.

I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect...
Let each man hope and believe what he can.
~ Charles Darwin

 

Epilogue and Prologue ...

The Web 's Way  to the WORD's WORLD

In the beginning was the WORD ...

The WWW creates a multidimencional Web of Roads.

Those Roads have their beginning at the civilization that was raised on a concept of a plane BOOK; the civilization that has existed for thousands of years. 

The Hyperlinks -- Roads of World Wide Web  -- lead from a BOOK of a plane text to the multidimencional Universe of WORDs, to the WORD's WORLD, which becomes the kernel concept of the next civilization...

 

If all this seems like a wild idea, that means you understand it. 
These are times wild with possibility.
Ted Nelson, 1982

---

 

See also:

Internet pre-History: Ancient Roads of Telecommunications & Computers

Silicon Valley History

 

Roads and Crossroads of the Internet History. By Gregory Gromov

For a history of the Internet readers should consult Gregory Gromov's The Roads and Crossroads of the Internet's History. 
Virtual Seminar for Teaching Literature.  Internet Teaching 1. Some Basic Concepts. Humanities Computing Unit of Oxford University, 

Oxford University UK, 1996

_________

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.

There's also a picture of Al and Tipper Gore at their wedding, twenty years before the WWW came into existence. And I'm not going to tell you why it's there. You can find out for yourself. (And if you want to be a killjoy you can post the reason below ..)
by  Robin Miller. Best High-Tech Sights on the Net! 26 Oct.1998

.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...

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

_________

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet 's History by Gregory R. Gromov... is an excellent history of the internet and a good example of a "web document." ...  You also should experience what "hypertext" is and why this experience is more like exploring than reading. But just like an exploration, it is up to you how extensively you explore. And just like any explorer you may end up "lost." Don't panic, just click on one of the links at the top of the window to return to one of the "pages" in the document. There are links at the top to each of the nine parts to this document. 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

_________

The Roads and Crossroads of the Internet's History. By Gregory R. Gromov. A critically acclaimed site for a comprehensive history of the Internet.

The University of Texas, System Digital Library.

_________

For anyone who has ever wondered how and why the Internet was created comes this extensive essay, "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet's History."   With this document, users can follow the development of the Net from its early stages as a military communication system to the multimedia extravaganza we know today.  

Webcrawler: Internet User Guides Reviews *Hot* Web Sites, 1996

_________

... an excellent 9-part review of the Internet's history and its relationship with the information revolution. Very informative and quite amusing at times too!
CADVision  Development Corporation

_________

An excellent summary of key milestones in Internet history.

BellSouth. 1996

_________

 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

_________

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
LineOne,  UK

_________

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

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

_________

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  ...   Study all nine (9) pages ... 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

_________

Read through your history- wonderful!
Dionne Dames. 25 Oct 1998 

_________

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

_________

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

_________

A somewhat wild and wacky history of the internet....
EBEAB: Internet History. by Marcus Kazmierczak

_________

Gregory  Gromov provides an impressionistic  overview in "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet's History," ... with a particular concentration on the development of   hypertext and the Web. 
Current  Literature of the online community by Eron Main ErmineTech Ltd,  Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto

_________

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

_________

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

_________

... Well done on an interesting and informative piece of work
Simon Cockroft  12 Apr 1999 15:52:15 

_________

Gregory R. Gromov’s The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History is probably the history that most students will enjoy as it is sprinkled liberally with files that illustrate his points. Commencing with Internet pre-history work your way through 9 sections to read about the web, browser wars, and Xanadu to name a few topics. It is a long essay but extremely interesting.

The Australian National University. Faculty of Art,  Canberra

_________

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History - Gregory Gromov's comprehensive and fascinating overview of the philosophy and history of the Internet. 

Cource  STS 3700B 6.0: “History of Computing and Information Technolog” by Luigi M Bianchi. School of Analitical Studies & Information Technology. Science and Technology Studies. York University, Canada

_________

Finally, an entertaining and eye-catching approach to Internet history is Gregory R. Gromov's History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History. This site is worth visiting, as much for its unorthodox approach using dazzling visuals and hypertext style as its content.

By Deborah Husted Koshinsky and Rick McRae, University Libraries State University of New York at Buffalo

_________

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History by Gregory Gromov  ...  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.

"Nettalk : A Brief History of the 'Net" by Kelly Ward. The Bulletin. Special Libraries Association, San Francisco Bay region. The School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) -- a graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley.

_________

 For anyone who has ever wondered how and why the Internet was created comes this extensive essay,  "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet's History." With this document, users can follow the development of the Net from its early stages as a military communication system to the multimedia extravaganza we know today.

Cource Education 2751: "Power and Communication Technology" by Bridget A. Ricketts Prince of Wales Collegiate, Newfoundland Canada

 

 

 

Encyclopedias:

• The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia. p. 197
• Encyclopedia of New Media : An Essential Reference to Communication and Technology - p. 489
• Encyclopedia of library and information science: Volume 3 - p. 2817; Volume 68 - p. 340
• Encyclopedia of computer science and technology - p. 261
• The Gale Encyclopedia of Science - p 2176

Scholars & Books

• Innovation and the Communications Revolution: From the Victorian Pioneers to Broadband Internet. The Institution of Engineering and Technology (April 29, 2002). Page. 285
• On-Line Teaching: Tools and Projects. Oxford University. Pages.10, 15, 79
• Law, Economics and Cyberspace: The Effects of Cyberspace on the Economic Analysis of Law (New Horizons in Law and Economics Series) Page 179
• Cyberimperialism?: Global Relations in the New Electronic Frontier - Politics in the Electronic Global Village. 2000. Page 90
• CREATING A SILICON VALLEY IN INDIA? Delhi Business Review. Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan.2000  
• Entrepreneurship Models of the Countries that Leverage Silicon Valey. University of California, Berkeley. 2004. page 1
• How can we strengthen links between entrepreneurial companies and entrepreneurial universities in the UK? Cambridge-MIT Institute Technology Policy Programme; Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge March 2005. Page 16
• University of Southampton, UK - School of Education - Classroom and chatroom – Why school science pupils should discuss practical science work online. Page 17
• Internet Infrastructure in Israel. A proposal for reform. Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Division for Economic Policy Research. No. 43, August 1999
• New York State Meta-Regional History and Current Need for an Upstate Transformational Network: "Canal Innovation Corridor".
• NANOTECHNOLOGY: THE NEXT GREAT WAVE OF INNOVATION. White Paper. By the NOVA Workforce Board. Sunnyvale, CA. September 2003 page. 27
• Growing industrial clusters in Asia: serendipity and science. World Bank. Washington, D.C. page 42
• Technology Transfer: What India can learn from the United States. Journal of Intellectual Property Rights. Vol 10, September 2005. Page 405
• Socio-Economic Impacts of ICT. E-government, the Local Level. A Discussion Paper. Social Science Research Centre. Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Canterbury. June 2002. Page 4
• The cyberspace handbook - Page 295
• Fundamentals Of Computer Networks - Page 84
• The Internet: the basics - Page 202
• The cyberspace handbook - Page 295
• Fundamentals Of Computer Networks - Page 84
• Financing economic development in the 21st century - Page 345
• Cybercrime: criminal threats from cyberspace - Page 225
• Growing industrial clusters in Asia: serendipity and science - Page 42
• Fundamentals Of Computer Networks - Page xxxi
• Adolescents and literacies in a digital world - Page 212
• Database management with Web site development applications – Page 17
• Choice: books for college libraries. Association of College and Research Libraries. Volumes 41, 43
• Global enterprise transitions: managing the process - Page 156
• XML Family of Specifications: A Practical Guide 2002. Addison-Wesley. Page 29
• Understanding community: The implications of information flow and social interactions in online discussion groups by Combs Turner, Tammara, Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, 2008
• Liberty and research and development: science funding in a free society – Page. 49
• Public Administration: An Introduction - Page 415
• The Internet and the construction of the immigrant public sphere : ... - Page 92
• Politics on the Internet: a student guide - Page 12
• Bill Clinton - Page 20
• Steve Jobs Thinking Differently: An Unauthorized Biography. Simon & Schuster. 2011
  
  and much more. Hundreds of print titles.
   

The Internet founding fathers that are referring to NetValley :

The World Wide Web Consortium was founded by Tim Berners-Lee at MIT and currently headed by him, is referring to History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History from their A Little History of the World Wide Web that was created circa 1995 by Robert Cailliau.

The Internet Society (ISOC) provides leadership in Internet related standards, education and policy since 1992. The ISOC is referring to History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History from their List of reputable sources of the Histories of the Internet

The universities that are referring to Netvalley.com publications in their online courses:

Harvard University. The course of CSCI E-12, Fundamentals of Web Site Development

Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Laboratory - STS 145 - Command and Conquer in the Development of Real-Time Strategy

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, White Papers on Technology Issues for Educators of 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006: History of the Internet

York University, Canada. SCHOOL OF ANALYTIC STUDIES & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. The course of STS 3700B 6.0 -- History of Computing and Information Technology

Duke University, Department of Computer Science . The course of Internet Discussion Links & Questions

University of Regina, Canada. Department of Media Production + Studies. The Language of New Media. INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MEDIA, FILM 208.001. Fall Semester 2002

University of Bonn, Germany: History of Science: History of computing:  Internet's History

The San Diego Supercomputer Center, The Regents of the University of  California. The History of the Internet

American Institute of Physics, Online resources for the history of physics & allied fields. History of the Internet

Drexel University, Department of Mathematics Swarthmore College, The cource: Mathematics and the WWW - Section 8: Beyond the Web

American Studies at the University of Virginia. Science and Technology - Science and Culture - History of the Internet

New Mexico State University: The cource lsc311 - Internet History & Development

Cornell University, Department of Computer Science. The course of CS 502  Architecture of Web Information Systems and Digital Libraries

University of Montevallo.  President’s Message: What would it take to create a ‘Golden Age’ at Montevallo?

University of Alabama in Huntsville. The course of  CM 100 - Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication.   History of the Internet

Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.  Tutorials, traduccions i altres documents. How it all began: a brief history of the Internet  

______

Click here to download a mobile friendly PDF version of this book.  Permission is granted for use of this History  for educational, non-commercial purposes as long as it remains unmodified and source is acknowledged. For all other uses, please contact the author first.

Copyright © 1995-2013 Gregory Gromov