“Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough—network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser—inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology. Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.”
vanityfair.com/culture/featu … rentPage=1
I first started getting my brain around the concept of how interconnected the world could be on my honeymoon back in '89. We’d dropped by my bro-in-law’s home for a short visit and he showed us an e-mail he’d sent a work colleague in Scotland that day and the subsequent reply, on his PC. Until that point home computers seemed kind of like a really expensive toy or for total tech-heads but that one piece of email really made it clear that the real world was going to never be quite the same again…
