Gardner: I’m teaching in my annual foray into the classroom – this time 366 students trying to stay awake as I talk about “The Web From Inside Out: From Geeks to Google to Facebook”. I hold a couple of sessions on the topic of the development of networks, the inter-network (internet) through to the emergence of the Web. I’m fascinated by the way this topic is received, or slept through, by students today who’ve never known a world without the web.
The development of the internet is the story of: Arpanet, Robert Taylor, Wesley Clark, (“you’ve got the network inside out!”, 1967, at the end of a meeting of ARPA’s Principal Investigators), Paul Baran, Donald Watts Davies,”Lick”, the boys at BBN, Len Kleinrock, Doug Engelbart, & Vint Cerf, to name the central figures (apologies to the tens of dozens of others who played central, marvellous, and creative roles omitted here). But it’s fundamentally a story about connecting first multiple hosts and then by extension multiple networks.
The web doesn’t enter into it, as you know, until someone came along and needed to find and share research documents to visiting physicists who had limited time on an expensive and constrained resource at CERN, and needed to be brought up to speed on the work of their predecessors at the place quickly and without personal guidance. TBL offered a way to do that. Of course others were doing document distributed find and share (Mark McCahill notably with his furry bucktooth rodent thingy). But the web was about distributed information and really did harken back to the associative trails of Vanneaver Bush.
We have to do our Woods Hole thing my friend. Really. All the best in your new intellectual “home”.
Phil