The History of the Internet
One of my wierd tics is that I don't often make smart alek comments in email without researching them first. I was making a crack about Wednesday's report of a huge email fiasco at the UC Berkeley Law School, and wanted to make sure that I had my facts straight before I said that Berkeley was "just the place where the most commonly used email transport in the world, sendmail, was created."
In my search to check this information, I stumbled across The History of the Internet as told on about.com. I've seen a lot of this information before, but I don't think I'd ever seen so much of it strung together in a single article. From what I've seen, about.com tends to get their facts straight, and I'm sure Lu can let us know if any of this information is wrong.
I also found A Conversation with The Inventor of Email, Ray Tomlinson, where he talks about spam, viruses and the future of email.
I think that it's kinda fun that the early pioneers are starting to come out of the woodwork and become known for who they are. It's funny, because most of them were just doing the daily grind when they invented something that is now so ubiquitous.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." -Isaac Asimov
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History of the Internet and Jacob Lehman
It totally cracked me up that when I went to read Mike's new blog, up popped a picture of Jacob Lehman. It was rather eery yet strangely wonderful. I could picture a word balloon over his head thinking, "Who knew?"
History of the Internet
The history of the Internet as told on the linked websites looks pretty accurate to me. Compared to other aspects of computer/software history, it's been pretty well documented, particularly in the 1996 book Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. Also The Annals of the History of Computing has done two special issues on Bolt Bernanek and Newman with articles written by the guys who were there at the time.
I did learn one fascinating fact, though, in following the links from this site: "Supporting the theory that one form of communication never replaces but only compliments [sic] another, a special code for the '@' character was introduced in the Morse code in 2004."
So update your Morse code manuals. You can now send email addresses via Morse code.
Morse code and email
I'm not surprised. My cousin Eric's first Internet connection was over packet radio. Seems that ham operators preferred to supplement their preferred form of communication rather than spring for even rudimentary dialup service. It was only after Juno started offering free email service that he "upgraded" his connection to dialup speeds.