In 1996, technology historian Jennifer S. Light compared the talk of “cyberoptimists” about virtual communities to city planners’ earlier optimistic predictions about shopping malls. As the automobile colonized U.S. cities in the 1950s, planners promised that malls would be enclosed public spaces to replace Main Streets. But as Light pointed out, the transition to suburban malls brought new inequities of access and limited the space’s functions to those that served commercial interests.

"Reply all" redirects here. For the podcast, see Reply All (podcast).

in 1978 Gary Turk was working for the digital Equipment Corporation he was a sales rep and his job was to sell these the deck system 20. now this thing had built-in arpanet protocol support it was like you don't have to do anything special you could plug it into a network and it would just work and rightly or wrongly Gary thought well I reckon people who are on the upper net might be interested in knowing about this computer and digital didn't have a whole lot of sales going on on the US West Coast they had a big office on the East Coast but West Coast you know California Portland those kind of places they didn't really have much of a presence so he got his assistant to go through the arpanet directory and type in the email addresses of everybody on the American West Coast who had an email address 393 of them and put them now at this point they overflowed the header field so all the people who got this email got an email which started with about 250 other people's email addresses and then right down at the end of it it says hey we invite you to come and see the deck system 2020

one person whose Innovation is still a significant part of the way we work with it was this guy it's Ray Tomlinson and he was working on an opponent Mail system in 1971 and Rey invented at Rey is the person who went well hang on if we know the user's name and we know the arpanet host where they host their email we could put an at in the middle because it's Alice at the machine

There was no automatic advertising delivery. There was no personalization, or any kind of tracking. Instead, I go through all of this every morning, picking which ads I thought looked interesting today, and manually changing and updating the pages on my site.This also meant that, because there was no tracking, the advertising companies had no idea how many times an ad was viewed, and as such, we would only get paid per click.Now, the bigger sites had started to do dynamic advertising, which allowed them to sell advertising per view, but, as an independent publisher, I was limited to only click-based advertising.However, that was actually a good thing. Because I had to pick the ads manually, I needed to be very good at understanding my audience and what they needed when they visited my site. And so there was a link between audience focus and the advertising.Also, because it was click based, it forced me as an independent publisher to optimize for results, whereas a 'per view' model often encouraged publishers to lower their value to create more ad views.

Incidentally, when a straightforwardly “I’m a Nazi” Nazi showed up in the beta, people used the report function, and the Bluesky team labeled the account and banned it from the Bluesky app and restricted promotion of the account of the person who invited him. This changed exactly none of the tenor of the Nazi conversation on Mastodon, but it happened.

reinventing Google Sidewiki or similar systems in which replies exist outside of the network itself.

Walter Benjamin termed the book ‘an outdated mediationbetween two filing systems’

He started work at COMSAT, where he had access to funding from the Department of Defense, some of which was earmarked for the ARPANET. “It was a sandbox,” he later told an interviewer. “We just were told, ‘Do good deeds.’ But the good deeds were things like develop electronic mail, and protocols.”

So this is one of these things where the idea that you could make an internet is 100%, just from biology being so much more complex and working so well for decades.DEVON: And why is the decentralization of biological systems and of the internet so important for scalability?

And that identity, like most of us was white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian. That's how the Internet got personified in those early days. Again, this wasn't everyone If you gathered all of us to talk about those early days, the women, the people of color, they would tell different stories. But it was most of us.

Instead of emphasizing the role of popular innovation and amateur invention, the dominant myths in internet history focus on the trajectory of a single military-funded experiment in computer networking: the Arpanet. Though fascinating, the Arpanet story excludes the everyday culture of personal computing and grassroots internetworking. In truth, the histories of Arpanet and BBS networks were interwoven—socially and materially—as ideas, technologies, and people flowed between them

Funnily enough one of the reasons I started looking into the decentralized social media space in 2016, which ultimately led me to go on to create Mastodon, were rumours that Twitter, the platform I’d been a daily user of for years at that point, might get sold to another controversial billionaire.

ʰᵉʳᵉ ᵃʳᵉ ᵗʰᵉ ᵈʳʸʷᵃˡˡ ʷᵉᵇˢᶤᵗᵉ ᵉᵃˢᵗᵉʳ ᵉᵍᵍˢ

I spend most of my day in iOS Notes app.

You.com’s big differentiating feature is that it lets people influence which sources they see. You can “upvote” and “downvote” specific categories, so when you run searches, you’ll see preferred sources first, neutral searches next, and downvoted sources last.

Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture. Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I’m not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There’s a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of the nineteenth century. The big problem with our culture is that it’s being dominated, because the electronic media we have is so much better suited for transmitting pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. Anything that’s been worked on and developed and you [can] go to the next couple levels. Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz. Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

They are often cited as the first website to feature banner ads.

The first Wired website, therefore, has a unique distinction of being an unofficial, amateur project led by two people from a different country uploading copyrighted content they didn’t own to a site that lacked any of the panache, glitz, or unconventional charm that had made Wired famous.

Huge web properties were started during this era including Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the process, the importance of centralized platforms like AOL greatly diminished.

Netheads vs Bellheads

collaborative effort between a university professor and a government researcher (much like the collaborations at the beginnings of the Internet)

Docker eventually sold out to (I believe) Bell and the professors did just fine.

One of the earliest nonscience scholarly uses of this technology was the listHumanist,

Towards a More Postcolonial Internet for Learning