Tucked into the various chapters are factlets that reveal delightful and often surprising details about elements of digital communication we’ve come to take for granted. For instance, the section on the emoticon (#19) — which made its debut in 1881 and is also among the 100 diagrams that changed the world — Boulton explains that telegraph operators used early examples of type-based sentiment: “73” meant “best regards” and “88” love and kisses.

He writes in the introduction:

Exploring the history of the Web is not just a nostalgic trip into our recent digital past but an exploration of the very way we think and communicate. Our thought processes are non-linear and erratic but the way we make sense of things and express ourselves is linear. Pioneers like Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Theodor Nelson, Douglas Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee questioned this conviction. Their legacy is the World Wide Web. A place that breaks down national and cultural borders. A place that blurs the boundaries between generating and exchanging ideas. A place that toppled regimes and created new economic models. A place that has radically changed the way we work, play, shop, socialize and otherwise participate in society. But above all, a place that is for everyone.

Our thought processes are non-linear and erratic but the way we make sense of things and express ourselves is linear. Pioneers like Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Theodor Nelson, Douglas Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee questioned this conviction.

The internet, which predates the web by decades, has somewhat unlikely beginnings. (Boulton makes a lucid, charmingly indignant distinction between the two: “The terms “World Wide Web” and “internet” are often used interchangeably, which is plain wrong. The internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. It is the infrastructure that carries email, instant messaging, Voiceover, IP, network games, file transfer and, of course, the Web.”) In the quest to win the Space Race during the Cold War, the U.S. government established ARPA — the Advanced Research Projects Agency — with grand ambitions, including the creation of an Intergalactic Computer Network. On October 29, 1969, researchers combined ARPA’s three major computing projects — a communications system that could survive a nuclear attack, a computer time-sharing concept, and an operating system — to successfully connect computers between three different universities, creating the world’s first packet-switching network. Known as ARPANET, it was a manifestation of the vision for an Intergalactic Computer Network, which is essentially what we know as the internet.

[..]

Until we discover the digital equivalent of acid-free paper, bits and bytes remain extremely fragile.

[..]

I have a dream for the Web … in which computers … become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web — the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web,” which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade,bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines.

and/or become irrelevant (B et al)

rev of everyday life

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via kevin owocki tweet:

a more regenerative web is not only possible, it is inevitable 🌱
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/owocki/status/1579804231678431232

a nother way (for 8bn people to live)

only inevitable if we want legit free people (ie: org’s around legit needs)

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