A history of the Internet, part 2: The high-tech gold rush begins

Summary

Welcome to the second article in our three-part series on the history of the Internet. If you haven’t already, read part one here. As a refresher, here’s the story so far: The ARPANET was a project started by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency in 1969 to network different mainframe computers together across the country. Later, it evolved into the Internet, connecting multiple global networks together using a common TCP/IP protocol. By the late 1980s, investments from the National Science Foundation (NSF) had established an “Internet backbone” supporting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. These users were mostly professors, researchers, and graduate students. In the meantime, commercial online services like CompuServe were growing rapidly. These systems connected personal computer users, using dial-up modems, to a mainframe running proprietary software. Once online, people could read news articles and message other users. In 1989, CompuServe added the ability to send email to anyone on the Internet. In 1965, Ted Nelson submitted a paper to the Association for Computing Machinery. He wrote: “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” The paper was part of a grand vision he called Xanadu, after the poem by Samuel Coleridge. A decade later, in his book “Dream Machines/Computer Lib,” he described Xanadu thusly: “To give you a screen in your home from which you can see into the world’s hypertext libraries.” He admitted that the world didn’t have any hypertext libraries yet, but that wasn’t the point. One day, maybe soon, it would. And he was going to dedicate his life to making it happen. As the Internet grew, it became more and more difficult to find things on it. There were lots of cool documents like the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Internet, but to read them, you first had to know where they we...