They say that history is written by the victorious…which begs the question as to how Al Gore and Friendster manage to get center stage in a history of the Internet.
Vanity Fair writes a rambling eight-part 22 page story on history of the Internet called “How The Web Was Won” for its latest edition. The article pays tribute to Internet pioneers, including Al Gore, as well as some of the companies that have defined the commercial Internet (Amazon, Ebay, PayPal, Ning, MySpace, Friendster, YouTube).
It’s going to be fairly easy to nitpick the list of companies included in the photo slideshow. No Google, for example. No Firefox, Yahoo or Microsoft. Nary a word on Facebook. Or any non-U.S. companies for that matter. And the history of computer networking and the Internet is, necessarily, somewhat abridged and leaves a lot of people out (I think one of the best quick reads on the history of the Internet is Andy Kessler’s How We Got Here if you are looking for something a little meatier).
Dozens of people were interviewed for the article, which is mostly an edited version of those interviews. The people highlighted in photographs: the Internet “Founding Fathers” (Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, Larry Roberts), YouTube (Steve Chen, Chad Hurley), Al Gore (for his legislative work that “paved the way for…the Internet as we know it today), Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Ning (Gina Bianchini, Marc Andreessen), MySpace (Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson), Jonathan Abrams, and the “Wizards” (Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn).
Very interesting!
No Google?!
What does Ning do in this list ? Think I missed something …
here’s the bit on Andreessen and Ning, which talks a lot about Netscape.
“The Next Big Thing? Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen
Andreessen created one of the first Web browsers, Mosaic, in 1993, before co-founding Netscape Communications with entrepreneur Jim Clark. Netscape’s initial public offering, in 1995, signaled the start of the dot-com boom and changed Silicon Valley forever. Now he has partnered with investment banker Bianchini to create the social network Ning, which lets users design their own social Web pages. “When people start to get comfortable with how something works,” says Bianchini, “they want the freedom to create. We think that is going to happen in social networking.””
How can they not mention Google. Is it because Old Media is scared of mentioning the companies name in any print media.
Leaving out Google, is like presenting the History of Boxing and not mentioning Muhammed Ali.
I sincerely hope that Jon Postel http://en.wikip...wiki/Jon_Postel gets a mention ?!
I think you need a hug Mike, you seem to be ranting a lot more recently.
Ning? Ning??? Whoever their PR firm is just earned a couple years worth of retainer.. wow.
Since they are excluding firefox, google, non-us companies, facebook etc, they’ve just killed the point of writting the history of the internet.
No, all wrong. The working mechanics of the internet are based on modern computing hardwares/devices, which were developed/pioneered by Nobel Laureate Physicists such as John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain for their invention of transistors which lead to the birth of tech-sector as we know it today as Silicon-Valley. The field of micro-electronics was thus born and the explosion of the information age today is the result of that important development. Without the semiconductor devices being invented, there would be no internet today. So, some credit must be given to those pioneers in the development of semiconductor devices which hardly any modern electronic gadget today that is semiconductor free, almost all electronic gadgets today on the planet contains one.
i can’t help it but when i think Al Gore i think ManBearPig..
If the internet were a person, he would sue Vanity Fair.
Sigh!
At least for once Robert Cailliau is getting the mentioning he deserves.
Why would Vanity Fair even bother writing a piece on a topic as broad as the Internet? It’s just a pot-boiler I guess, but a least on the internet long boring stories don’t waste trees…
@10, if you want to go that far back, you may as well credit Ampere and Volta Yes, microelectronics is a prerequisite for the internet, but you can have computers without networking, and you can have networking without *internetworking*. There were real practical problems that had be solved to make the internet scale, and make it affordable. Building the internet was partially a problem of network hardware design, and majorly a problem of software architecture.
What’s a crying shame is how front loaded this is to flash in the pan companies that arrived in the last few years or even the web, even Arrington is clueless. They practically skip to 1994, with no mention of a HUGE amount of work that was done in the 80s and early 90s. No mention of all that we owe the IETF. Nothing about SMTP, IMAP, NNTP, DNS, etc No mention of netnews/usenet, archie, gopher, wais, MUDs, IRC, listserv, the role of Unix and VMS, and the TONS of stuff that existed before youngster carpetbaggers like Arrington arrived on the scene.
Do us a favor Mike, don’t take umbrage at someone else writing a crappy history of the internet if you’re going to make the same mistakes of hyping the important of recent arrivals who had nothing to do with the architecture of the *internet* (not web)
The article should have been titled “History of the Web”, because the internet as it is today gelled in the 80s.
Who cares about the history of internet written by Vanity Fair? It doesn’t change history itself..
I know the Internet was around forty years before Tin Berners-Lee came along. But it was he who put the World Wide Web on the map and if it weren’t for that, the Internet would still be used by the Military, Academia and a few select others who managed to use Gopher. How can you air-brush Tim out.
Ooops, sorry, I forgot. He was a Brit.
No one’s brushing Tim out, but if you want to talk about getting things out of Academia, don’t forget that it wasn’t until Mosaic/Netscape that endusers really started flocking, and even then, not until forms got implemented. Or do you really think people flocked to text-mode www/lynx? Realistically, the web didn’t take off until widespread ppp/slip and Netscape became available.
There were tons of people using dialup Usenet/POP/IMAP accounts before then, tons of ISPs started live as Unix shell providers.
The reality is, the Web is a far more trivial invention than the networking stack. Want to credit Tim Berners-Lee? Why don’t we credit Ted Nelson then, or the inventors of GML/SGML, or any of scifi book authors or essayists who had discussed hypertext systems before Tim. Compare the complexity of HTTP to DNS or TCP, which took greater amount of effort to design?
Without Tim, we would have had hypertext, it just would have looked different. We were already starting to get such systems before HTTP/HTML showed up. But without all the work that went into packet networks, routing, dns, etc we would have been in a far worse position, stuck on X.25 or FidoNet like systems coupled with corporate proprietary LANs. If a major disaster wiped out all knowledge of the internet, we’d spend far more time trying to reinvent the internet than reinevent the Web and everything that came after.
The web is a rather large footnote in the history of the internet, but one can’t discuss *how it all came to be* without discussing the core technology *taken for granted by most people* that is allowing you to read this message right now.
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Hilarious list.
“The web is a rather large footnote in the history of the internet”
Give me a break. The web was what made the Internet accessible to everyone, it was the equivalent of the printing press. Books existed before Gutenberg but they were totally inaccessible, just like the Internet was before Berners-Lee.
The web has been won? – by Google?
I love the Bianchini quote and how the thought of creativity in technology perpetuates itself to endless new plateaus…
“When people start to get comfortable with how something works,” says Bianchini, “they want the freedom to create”
And so on…
Less glamorous (and obviously I haven’t read it cos I’m a Brit too), but it would appear to be a bit stupid to leave out something like the Apache Foundation which made server software accessible on a much wider scale than proprietary software would have.
Not having read the article, I would be shocked beyond belief if they missed out ICQ (an Israeli company). The web truly changed the day that application shipped.
What about Napster and the P2P revolution? Slashdot? Hell even Wired was the first real dot.com site if memory serves….
I agree that there is only so much detail one can give to the “history” of the internet. How far do you go? PARC? Darpa? Cisco?
No love for Prodigy?
mp3 and porn. Those two items where the main catalyst that had people picking up internet subscriptions en masse.
The public access internet would not have been possible without the work of the fist ISP, Software Tool and Die, and Barry Shein, the man who started it.
http://www.scri...230398/sheinart
Arrington, how is this any different then your constant daily ramblings about Twitter, and other reoccurring names that don’t mean anything.
Modems, Prodigy, AOL and IM , Netscape, Microsoft – you know like the real pioneering things that brought the web to the masses, disregarding all of the technology leading up to them.
ICQ is HUGE.
You should also mention BBN for the IMP (first router application) and MITRE for all of its work on Ethernet and the slotted protocols that became TCP IP.
OOPS! You used the phrase “BEGS THE QUESTION” in an improper manner! “Begging the question” (Latin petitio principii) is a form of logical fallacy in which an argument is assumed to be true without evidence other than the argument itself. It does not mean “to raise the question.”
“irregardless” BTQ
Dig up the article “imposter boy” from GQ (circa 1997) and tell me who shouldn’t be on the list. After reading it, remember that history is written by the victors, and so is the spin.
just read the whole story. quotes by Larry Page, Yang and Filo, and Zuckerberg. Gotta read more than the captions, Mike
Is this the same rag that publishes articles on Jessica Simpson and Hanna Montana? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!!!!
Guys, stop wasting time on this, and go back to work…
Maybe a week-long vacation in Jamaica away from the Internet for a few days. Relax the mind. I bet the stories would improve a lot!
Man, this reminds me of what a good job Al Gore has always done with jumping to the front of a parade (and convincing the eager eyed media that he was leading it the whole time). So after he laid the groundwork for the internet, he also saved the planet from global warming (with a movie, none-the-less)… I wonder what he get credit for next… cure for cancer, end of hunger, world peace?
Unbelievable is the fact that even the author had to leave out Tim Berners Lee
Good post. Yes, how could they not include Google, Yahoo or Firefox. While Vanity Fair loves Al Gore, they should have replaced him with one of these.
I can’t believe Ning is even mentioned in this list. Who the hell are they to get the cover of Fast Company then be listed along side paypal and ebay.
I guarantee next year Ning won’t even be around. Mark your calendar. June 4th, 2009 “Ning Who?”
No Tim Berners Lee? Instead, ******* Ning?
Ning?????????
Mike, not sure why you chose to review the slide show instead of the article, but Page, Zuckerberg, Yang and Filo, and many others are quoted in the body of the piece.
Also, for other commenters: Berners-Lee is credited in the text.
(Disclosure: I played a very minor role in editing the article.)
Very interesting
Finally, US PR machine woke up to the fact that they were gettting fucked once again by the British propaganda making Barenes-Lee or whatever his name is to be the inventor of the web. Who will remember in hundred years what was internet what was web, they will only know that a Brit invented the web, the way Newton invented mechanics and science and Shaekespeares invented english language. It’s about time that Americans set the record straight. . .
Every own has there own version of ‘history’. Internet was invented during our time (certainly my time) I would always have my little story.
If you would’ve read the article, or at least Mike’s comment, Ning was mentioned because of Marc Andreessen’s involvement with Mosiac. Mosaic was one of the first web browsers. It’s definitely not a complete text of how the internet came to be. It’s a long article with the oral history of the web from a couple of it’s founders. My only question, Why Vanity Fair?