For Clay’s class this week we read from Jane Abbate’s Inventing the Internet. It’s an interesting account of the early Internet and the personalities that helped to shape it. As with anything that gets really big (and I think I can safely say that the Internet is now “really big”) you often read accounts of the early days, when it was still all fresh and new and everybody knew each other. It’s kind of like hearing about the early rave scene – no matter how early you managed to find it, there was always somebody who was necking yokes listening to Orbital by a suburban roadside when you were still listening to heavy metal and sewing badges onto your clothes. Not that I ever did either thing, mind you.
Anyway it turns out that some guy helped make e-mail popular because he was in charge of budgets and he responded most quickly to people who contacted him that way. So the killer app was helped on its way by office brown nosing. Kind of as if people started giving one another massages at raves because their boss encouraged inter-employee fondling.
Two interesting links Clay gave us too (well for those who love to read about how by the time they came along the Internet wasn’t cool anymore):
Hobbes Internet Timeline
What Is the Internet?
