0 Final Journey 2

The Journey Between "@bushWeMayThink1945" and "publisher11EvolutionInternet2016"¶

Within this course, my main goal was to simply get a history of the internet. I am a computer science student, so understanding how the internet was developed and became how it is today was a very intriguing topic to me. However, what I didn't expect, was the very historical approach to teaching this history. As a CS student, I was expecting a technical explanation of the internet, likely from when the time period in which the internet was being developed. I ended up gaining a different history of the internet, begining with things that were seemingly completely unrelated to the internet I know today.

One of the first papers I read in this class was @bushWeMayThink1945. This paper a summary of the author Vannevar Bush envisioning new technologies in different fields, explaining why they may be needed and how current technologies can be improved. This was in a time where most of the technological innovations were within the field of war. He argues that men need to move away from technologies of war, and begin developing tools that can strengthen the mind. Bush covered a broad range of topics, predicting things like smaller cameras that can be attached to your head, advanced artihmetic machines, and logic machines. I came to the realization that without individuals like Bush, technology may not have been pushed to the point where the internet would have been possible. Then, I understood that the history of the internet was much deeper than just its technological development.

Once technology started becoming more mainstream, like Vannevar Bush predicted, the product lifecycle became much quicker, and recent technologies quickly became obsolete. This trend was something that really interested me, and was very important to the recent development of the internet, as well as other technologies. Instead of humanity holding on to one technology for many years, they began phasing out of sight very quickly. @coopersmithFaxedRiseFall2015 explained this in terms of the fax machine, stating that “such proponents and observers hailed fax as a 'coming wonder' in the 1930s, a 'Cinderella' in the 1940s, a 'commercial infant' in the 1950s, a 'sleeping giant' in the 1960s, and an 'aged infant' in the 1970s.” (Coopersmith, 2015, p. 17). This is a lifecycle of a mere 40 years. During the @bookLab, the professor mentioned that scrolls were used for more than 4000 years, which is a 100x decrease in lifespan between two technologies, which were used for similar purposes, in this case being communication.

After researcch on this subject, it was clear to me that this decrease in technologies lifetimes was a critical part in the history of the internet. Paired with the relative ease to create new technologies, such as Gopher (@driscollBirthModemWorld2022), relatively new technologies would be taken over by even newer technologies, that would again by quickly taken over by technologies that improved upon these. Thus, the lifecycle of the internet was created.

The decrease in a techologies lifetime was just one important piece of history that I felt completely related to my goal in learning the history of the internet. However, there are many more pieces of knowledge that I gained in this course that also contributed to my goal. For example, learning about the history of punch cards was very intriguing to me, and was the first part of this course which really made me understand why we were taking such a historical approach when learning about a relatively new concept, being the internet. I began understanding how so many different points in history that are seemingly unrelated to the current internet had their own purpose in pushing technology to the point where the internet became a possibility, and without each of these points, the internet would not have been created.

The 3rd part of this course was where I really achieved my goal of understanding the history of the internet. As interesting and important the historical aspect of the course was, the point in which we started focusing on more current aspects of the internet was extremely interesting to me. Learning about not just how the internet came to existence, but rather the points in its history that allowed it to become how it is today, was what I really wanted to get out of this course.

I was able to apply what I had learned before to the events that happened in the history of the current internet to better understand how and why these events occured, and how they changed the course of the internets development.

For example, the dotcom crash was a significant event in the development of the internet, possibly even the most significant. Using my previous knowledge of the history of the internet, and trends that caused it to be developed, I was able to relate the dotcom crash to the trend of recent technologies quickly became obsolete. This ability to relate historical events and trends to current trends and events on the internet was what really allowed me to achieve my goal in this class. I now can understand certain trends on the internet, such as social media trends explained by @publisher11EvolutionInternet2016, and relate them to other events in history unrelated to the internet, overall giving me a better understanding of the internet and its history.