Last week I realised I was working a week behind everyone else and resolved to catch up this week, but the weather has been wayyyy too good to be spending my time chained to a computer so I'm still a little behind.
Firstly I will present 'Lauren's very short history of the internet' which is an adaptation of David Clough's version of Bruce Sterling's original. Quite a mouthful, but a worthwhile read.
Secondly, I will provide my own summary of Felix Stalder's "Information Ecology".
As you may have gathered, this blog post is content based because I'm saving my stories for a more relevant reading.
1964 - RAND proposal made public
1968 - The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set up the first test network
Autumn 1969 - First node installed in UCLA
December 1969 - Four nodes existed on ARPANET
1971 - Fifteen nodes on ARPANET
1972 - Thirty seven nodes on ARPANET
1977 - TCP/IP used by other networks to link to ARPANET
1983 - Military broke off from ARPANET to create MILNET
1984 - National Science Foundation linked up newer, faster supercomputers through thicker and faster links
1986, 1988, 1990 - National Science Foundation upgrades and expands
1989 - ARPANET expired
1990s - Ferocious growth of the Internet
1992 - Over a million files available to anyone who asks for them
Obviously, this is very out of date and "over a million files" is absolutely nothing compared to what is available on the internet these days, but I found through further research that a more detailed and current history of the internet is so cluttered and filled with discoveries and upgrades that the timeline would be more of a day-by-day thing and, to be honest, I cbf.
What I learnt from Information Ecology
- Marshall McLuhan is mentioned in almost all my digc classes and produced many quotable quotes
- digital media builds an integrated environment on flows of information
- virtually all human actions rely of digital information networks
- there are 4 basic dimensions of an information ecology
- interdependency
- change
- time-boundness
- differentiation
- information ecology is basically an environment where nodes and information all live and network within the above dimensions
Apologies for the bland blog post, but I promise the next installment will have you on the edge of your seat
Stalder, F. (2005) 'Information Ecology'. In Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks pp. 62-66
[URL: http://felix.openflows.com/pdf/Notebook_eng.pdf]Sterling, B. (1993) 'A Short History of the Internet', The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [URL:http://sodacity.net/system/files/Bruce_Sterling_A_Short_History_of_the_Internet.pdf]
Nice summary of the internet timeline Lauren - I like it that you stopped at the million files mark. Fascinating that today we don't even count the number of files any more - just their overall size.
ReplyDeleteoh, and that gif is hilarious :)
I still find it mind bolggling that the original plans for the internet were discovered/invented in the 60's and yet it took 3 decades for it to take off. It is really interesting to see how many scholars and great thinkers of the 19th and early 20th century somewhat preidcted the internet.
ReplyDeletehaha your post is not as dull as you are making out ... to be frank the history of the internet really ist the most exhilarating topic :D what i find interesting about the internet's capacity to have over a million files available, is that so much of the internet's information is never accessed.. how many blogs and home made web pages are never accessed i wonder...
ReplyDeleteYou have succeeded in being very informative ... The timeline of the internet is very interesting - I think that how contemporary internet has developed is all just a big mistake - we should congratulate RAND corporation!
ReplyDeleteI am looking forward to the thrilling post you have installed for us next week!