Neal Homepage / Web History 2 / Apostle Islands
The beginings of the internet start with the transformation of communication. I put it on May 24, 1844 when Mr. Samuel Morse sent the first message via his invention, the telegraph. Overcoming the distant communications barrier lead us to the world wide web.
The thing that really made the World Wide Web workable was the 56K modem. I remember trying to use the internet on dial up in the late 90s and being frustrated at how slow the pages would load. The internet could not be what it is today, the vehicle through which we do almost everything if it was still painfully slow.
In an interview with the New York Times
Robert W. Taylor, a main player in the DARPA project
expressed a fundamental motivation that has pushed and characterized the
functionality of the internet. Having
a different sets of user commands for each computer resulted
in a lot of getting up, moving and logging in, which was inefficent
and disruptive. Taylor said "I don't want to do it" capturing
the basic human drive to make things easy!, to do more from one spot,
perhaps a
warm cozy spot.
Thanks to "I don't want to do it," we have online banking. We can order virtually anything online and have it delivered to our homes. We can even make friends and mingle without leaving our living rooms.
ALSO: Reading through the history of the internet I see the mix of ethnicities involved in the creation of the web. But where are all the women? Computer science is a field that has broken through international barriers but has remained a primarily gendered "man's" field of work, invention and breakthrough.