My formative experiences of computing and the internet are now regarded as “history” haha
Which is BRILLIANT because I get to experience them all again, only via people who are doing the work to actually document and interpret it.
So, some links!
Cybercultural is by Richard MacManus who founded and edited ReadWriteWeb from 2003–2012. This was the period in which we all figured out that the web wasn’t a magazine, or a shop, or a TV, but a new kind of medium, with people and attention as the matter and energy of its physics. Anyway, he knows what he’s talking about, that’s what I mean.
I loved GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet which has screenshots I’ve never seen, and the origin story of how and why_ they wanted to give people the sense that they had a home on the internet.
The History of the Web by Jay Hoffman and updates twice monthly (you can get a newsletter). I’ve found the best way to explore is to scroll down the timeline and click on articles as you see them.
This history of Perl and Python, The Linguist and the Programmer, brought back so many memories. (And made remember hanging out on the perl usenet back in the day… Abigail!)
Then these two articles about early online publishing:
What I really appreciate about Hoffman’s writing is that there are many, many links in the Sources section for these articles. Thank you!
Folklore is an older project and still a great one: Anecdotes about the development of Apple’s original Macintosh, and the people who made it.
I love reading about Mister Macintosh, a weird dumb idea (all the best ones are). From Steve Jobs:
Mr. Macintosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while, when you least expect it, and then winks at you and disappears again. It will be so quick that you won’t be sure if you saw him or not. We’ll plant references in the manuals to the legend of Mr. Macintosh, and no one will know if he’s real or not. …
One out of every thousand or two times that you pull down a menu, instead of the normal commands, you’ll get Mr. Macintosh, leaning against the wall of the menu.
Then you get the Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set and the origin story of rounded rectangles.
50 Years of Text Games by Aaron A. Read was originally a Substack and you can still read it there: A deep dive into text game history, from The Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon.
One per year.
It’s more than that: it’s a lens to see the culture around computing over two important generations.
Every piece in the archive is gold. Two faves are 1990: LamdaMOO about multiplayer, co-created text gaming… and the social structures they had to discover. (Also the subject of the amazing and prescient My Tiny Life (1998) by Julian Dibbell, which I mention here.)
And 2017: Universal Paperclips about a super-intelligent AI that makes paperclips…
Buy the 50 Years of Text Games book. I own it. 100% worth getting a copy.
Benj Edwards, literally anything written by him. Not a project but a person, Edwards is a tech journalist and video game/tech historian. So go browse his archive of deep-dives and also on Ars Technica.
I really enjoyed Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies (and also it reminded me about Leisure Suit Larry… what an era).
This is a classic: Who Needs GPS? The Forgotten Story of Etak’s Amazing 1985 Car Navigation System – how do you build satnav with no satellites? In other articles Edwards extended the story to the earlier video games and to Google Maps; I connected the dots here.
So from time to time I lecture on folktales from early computing. (A highlight was doing the whole 3 x 1 hour series on successive nights at a tech conference. Evening entertainment!)
The reason I love the early web - outside my usual period - is because (a) I was there, a little bit, and (b) it’s when computing stopped being primarily about the military, and business, and academia and became just about… life.
Let’s define the period as the September that never ended and everything after: in 1993/94, commercial ISPs got people online en masse, and the flood of newbs couldn’t be absorbed by existing cyberculture. In previous Septembers, students in the new academic year had netiquette beaten into them eventually but… so we’re the visigoths that trashed Rome. I love it.
But mainly, (c), this reason: we were all still figuring it out.
So there are all these roads not taken that are none-the-less fascinating, and I use them as references all the time in my work and I would love to dig deeper, and discover what I missed at the time.
i.e. I would love to follow along if you have a history project that hits on Kai’s Power Tools or SmarterChild or Taligent or net.art or… you know what I mean. lmk?
My formative experiences of computing and the internet are now regarded as “history” haha
Which is BRILLIANT because I get to experience them all again, only via people who are doing the work to actually document and interpret it.
So, some links!
Cybercultural is by Richard MacManus who founded and edited ReadWriteWeb from 2003–2012. This was the period in which we all figured out that the web wasn’t a magazine, or a shop, or a TV, but a new kind of medium, with people and attention as the matter and energy of its physics. Anyway, he knows what he’s talking about, that’s what I mean.
I loved GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet which has screenshots I’ve never seen, and the origin story of how and why_ they wanted to
The History of the Web by Jay Hoffman and updates twice monthly (you can get a newsletter). I’ve found the best way to explore is to scroll down the timeline and click on articles as you see them.
This history of Perl and Python, The Linguist and the Programmer, brought back so many memories. (And made remember hanging out on the perl usenet back in the day… Abigail!)
Then these two articles about early online publishing:
What I really appreciate about Hoffman’s writing is that there are many, many links in the Sources section for these articles. Thank you!
Folklore is an older project and still a great one:
I love reading about Mister Macintosh, a weird dumb idea (all the best ones are). From Steve Jobs:
Then you get the Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set and the origin story of rounded rectangles.
50 Years of Text Games by Aaron A. Read was originally a Substack and you can still read it there: One per year.
It’s more than that: it’s a lens to see the culture around computing over two important generations.
Every piece in the archive is gold. Two faves are 1990: LamdaMOO about multiplayer, co-created text gaming… and the social structures they had to discover. (Also the subject of the amazing and prescient My Tiny Life (1998) by Julian Dibbell, which I mention here.)
And 2017: Universal Paperclips about a super-intelligent AI that makes paperclips…
Buy the 50 Years of Text Games book. I own it. 100% worth getting a copy.
Benj Edwards, literally anything written by him. Not a project but a person, Edwards is a tech journalist and video game/tech historian. So go browse his archive of deep-dives and also on Ars Technica.
I really enjoyed Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies (and also it reminded me about Leisure Suit Larry… what an era).
This is a classic: Who Needs GPS? The Forgotten Story of Etak’s Amazing 1985 Car Navigation System – how do you build satnav with no satellites? In other articles Edwards extended the story to the earlier video games and to Google Maps; I connected the dots here.
So from time to time I lecture on folktales from early computing. (A highlight was doing the whole 3 x 1 hour series on successive nights at a tech conference. Evening entertainment!)
The reason I love the early web - outside my usual period - is because (a) I was there, a little bit, and (b) it’s when computing stopped being primarily about the military, and business, and academia and became just about… life.
Let’s define the period as the September that never ended and everything after: in 1993/94, commercial ISPs got people online en masse, and the flood of newbs couldn’t be absorbed by existing cyberculture. In previous Septembers, students in the new academic year had netiquette beaten into them eventually but… so we’re the visigoths that trashed Rome. I love it.
But mainly, (c), this reason: we were all still figuring it out.
So there are all these roads not taken that are none-the-less fascinating, and I use them as references all the time in my work and I would love to dig deeper, and discover what I missed at the time.
i.e. I would love to follow along if you have a history project that hits on Kai’s Power Tools or SmarterChild or Taligent or net.art or… you know what I mean. lmk?