A Graphical History of the Internet

(From MBA Online though I generally find MBAs rather useless.)

Via: MBA Online

The real history of the personal computer

A friend sent me a link to an excellent recounting of the real roots of the personal computer in an article on the Computer World site. In the article, Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer, Lamont Woods recounts the creation in San Antonio of the CPU that would eventually become the Intel 8008, the primordial ancestor of the hearts of the vast majority of today's personal computers. The similarities between what happened with CTC/Datapoint -- Intel interaction related to computer hardware and the Digital Research -- Microsoft interaction related to software struck me as I read this piece. It even continues with a couple of the people involved with these creations, Tim Patterson and Federico Faggin, although Faggin got the far shorter end of the stick from Intel than Patterson did from Microsoft.

Internet History

Are you interested in knowing how we got from point A to point B as far as the underlying networking that is the Internet came to be? If so then check out Hobbes' Internet Timeline and see not only the technology but some of the business artifacts of this most important communications system. Included are such things as this drawing of the what the Internet looked like in 1969; three different types of computers on four major university campuses. Thirty-five years later, IBM is the only one still in business.

Heard on Boston Legal this evening

First they came for the Communists
but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists
but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Jews
but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out.

And when they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.

Martin Niemoeller

Is the end of Compuserve near?

The old CompuServe* as we knew it went away about a year ago, replaced by a Prospero CMS site that looks and feels like every other big community site on the web. Today the graphic banner at the top of the pages became the Netscape banner. I know both these sites are now essentially hosted on the same (cluster of?) servers with different URLs producing different content so this could just be a CMS screw up OR it could be CompuServe's last gasp.

*If you click that link, pointing to www.compuserve.com, then examine where you wind up, you'll see CompuServe is now joined at the hip with Netscape.

IE User Interface Designer Switches to Firefox

The gentleman who did a lot of the user interface design for Internet Explorer versions 1-5 has switched to Firefox. He bares his soul on his blog as the Bill and Steve Experience shake out another double handful of Tums.