El largo artículo de Keenan Mayo y Peter Newcomb en Vanity Fair del próximo Julio 2008 (An Oral History of the Internet. How the Web Was Won) es de lo más interesante e ilustrador, al menos en términos de divulgación. Es bueno saber -aunque sea a grandes trazos- quienes, cuando y qué hicieron para que haya sido posible la actual realidad de internet.
El artículo de Vanity Fair consiste en una muy larga serie de entrevistas (transcripciones y grabaciones orales) con algunos de los principales protagonistas de internet, desde sus orígenes hasta ahora.
Merece la pena dedicar un poco de tiempo.
I: The Conception
Entre otros, entrevistas con:
Paul Baran, an electrical engineer, conceived one of the Internet’s
building blocks—packet switching—while working at the Rand Corporation
around 1960. Packet switching breaks data into chunks, or “packets,”
and lets each one take its own path to a destination, where they are
re-assembled (rather than sending everything along the same path, as a
traditional telephone circuit does).
Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at U.C.L.A., was
instrumental in creating the earliest computer networks, in the 1960s.
J. C. R. Licklider, one of the fathers of computer science and
information technology, was the first director of arpa’s computer-science division.
Robert Taylor left nasa and became the third director of arpa’s computer-science division. Taylor’s chief scientist was Larry Roberts, who oversaw development of the Arpanet. arpa’s director was Charles Herzfeld.
II: The Creation
Entre otras (Bob Metcalfe, Larry Roberts, Dan Webb) estas declaraciones de nuevos protagonistas:
In 1969, arpa gave the job of building
“interface message processors” (I.M.P.’s), otherwise known as “nodes”
or “packet switches”—the crucial hardware for sending and receiving
bursts of data—to Bolt, Beranek & Newman. In a congratulatory
telegram to the company, Senator Edward M. Kennedy referred to I.M.P.’s
as “interfaith” message processors.
Vint Cerf, who worked with Leonard Kleinrock at U.C.L.A., is the
co-designer (with Bob Kahn) of the TCP and IP protocols that provide
the basic linking structure of the Internet. He is now an executive at
Google, where his title is “chief Internet evangelist.”
III: The Web
In 1991, cern, one of the world’s largest
physics laboratories, based in Geneva, introduced the World Wide Web, a
vast document-linking structure developed by the British scientist Tim
Berners-Lee and his Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau. This robust new
global-information resource made possible the emergence of
“browsers”—software used to navigate the Web and maneuver through text
and images on-screen.
The first browser to take off was Mosaic, created
by Marc Andreessen, a student at the University of Illinois.
Entrepreneur and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark soon took notice
and partnered with Andreessen to create Netscape Communications.
IV: The Browser Wars
By 1995 the Netscape Navigator browser dominated the market. On
December 7, 1995, Microsoft C.E.O. Bill Gates gave a speech to his
employees outlining Microsoft’s aggressive new approach to the
Internet. He named Netscape as a target and rallied a team of top-notch
programmers to build Internet Explorer. The event is known in the
industry as Pearl Harbor Day.
Thomas Reardon was 21 years old when Bill Gates offered him a senior
position at Microsoft, in 1991. Reardon became a program manager for
Internet Explorer.
V: Going Public
Of all the “old media” tycoons, few were as quick to grasp the power
of the Internet as Barry Diller. Diller transformed QVC, his
home-shopping television channel, into an interactive Web enterprise.
Today, Diller presides over more than 60 Web businesses, including
Ticketmaster, the personals site Match.com, and the online travel
agency Expedia.
Jeffrey P. Bezos, a former analyst for the New York hedge fund D. E.
Shaw, created the online bookstore Amazon.com in 1995. Based in
Seattle, it is currently the world’s largest online retailer.
The Internet auction site eBay was created in 1995 by Pierre
Omidyar, a French-born Iranian computer programmer, and it now has some
276 million registered users in 39 countries.
In 1994, Stanford classmates Jerry Yang and David Filo launched
Yahoo, an early Web portal and search engine.
One of the earliest ventures in online journalism was Slate magazine, created under the aegis of Microsoft by Michael Kinsley, a prominent columnist, a former editor of The New Republic.
The role of the Internet as the bottom of the food chain for news
and gossip was illustrated and reinforced by the events that led up to
the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The allegation that Clinton
had pursued a sexual relationship with a White House intern, Monica
Lewinsky, was first circulated by the online Drudge Report after Newsweek declined
to publish a story on the same subject by Michael Isikoff. Mike McCurry
was the White House press secretary when the Lewinsky story broke.
VI: Boom and Bust
The dot-com boom of the 1990s was epitomized by the initial public
offering of Netscape Communications, in August 1995; on the opening day
of trading, Netscape’s stock price almost doubled in value. Before
long, Silicon Valley was the scene of the most frenzied investing in
modern times. Some companies, such as Amazon.com and eBay, had
realistic business models; many other start-ups did not. Record losses
soon followed.
Between March 10, 2000, and October 10, 2002, the nasdaq Composite Index, which lists most technology and Internet companies, lost 78 percent of its value.
VII: Modern Times
In 1998, two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, unveiled
their prototype of an Internet search engine that they believed
outperformed anything else available at the time. They gave it the
quirky name Google (from the mathematical term “googol,” or 10 to the
100th power). Today, Google dominates the search-engine business.
Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 to help revive its sagging
fortunes. Among his early initiatives: the iMac, a one-piece,
candy-colored computer that made easy Internet use the cornerstone of
its design. Four years later, Apple introduced the iPod and the online
music store iTunes.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is written and edited by
voluntary contributors, was launched in 2001 by former options trader
Jimmy Wales.
Long before Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington became household
names, journalist Dave Winer wrote what is widely credited to be one of
the first Web logs, or blogs. His motivation? The independent software
developer wanted to get his voice out—unexpurgated. His journal, called
Scripting News, has been publishing since 1997.
Today, there are more than 113 million blogs on the Web. Elizabeth
Spiers was the founding editor of Gawker, a Manhattan-centric
media-and-gossip blog.
In 2002, former Netscape engineer Jonathan Abrams created a new
movement in Internet activity with his “social networking” site
Friendster. While Friendster emerged as a darling of Silicon Valley, it
was eventually overtaken in the U.S. by the hipper MySpace, founded by
Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. Another rival emerged with the cleaner,
college-student-friendly Facebook, founded in a Harvard dorm in 2004 by
Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
Chad Hurley, a former graphic designer at PayPal, started YouTube in
2005 with his PayPal colleague the engineer Steve Chen. It was one of
the first media sites entirely driven by user-generated content.
According to The New York Times, in 2007 YouTube consumed as much
bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
VIII: The Last Word
The underpinnings of the Internet trace back in part to concerns
about national security. In October of this year the nation’s newest
military endeavor, the United States Air Force Cyber Command, is set to
commence operations. The command will employ a force of 8,000—mostly
tech-savvy civilians such as physicists, computer scientists, and
electrical engineers. Major General William Lord is the commander.
Steve Boriss ha publicado un largo, bien pensado y razonado escrito en Pajamas Media, "The Fight for Free Speech: Will We Be the Greatest Generation?".
