Vanity Fair Tackles A History of the Internet
The internet.
Now, that’s a somewhat broad topic– and not one I necessarily imagined would be of particular interest to Vanity Fair. Nonetheless, the magazine’s July issue includes a thorough and in fact, very illuminating, oral history of the Web, beginning with United States government’s creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1958 and ending with the emergence of blogs, social networks and our nation’s newest military endeavor, the United States Air Force Cyber Command.
The story is told in a series of quotations from relevant computer scientists, entrepreneurs, business men and women, government employees, lawyers, journalists, influencers and programmers, all of whom witnessed the internet’s birth and subsequent rise in some way, shape or form. Some of the most interesting come from Jeff Bezos, speaking on his vision of the largest book superstore, Mike McCurry, White House press secretary, on the Drudge Report’s infamous breaking of the Clinton-Lewinsky story and quotes from Lou Montulli, Thomas Reardon and Gary Reback on the early battles between Netscape and Microsoft.
While not groundbreaking in terms of uncovered facts or opinions, the article succeeds in bringing together a vast array of information through a series of fascinating vignettes, capturing the excitement that categorized the beginning of the Internet era and just how far we have come in the past fifty years.
No doubt an interesting read– and one that certainly begs the question of how the Internet will develop and continue to dramatically change the way we work, live and see the world in the half decade ahead.
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