The Web, initially a medium for scientific publishing and collaboration, made publishing online vastly easier by allowing users to embed images within text and to provide easy-to-follow links between different documents. It’s a history that finds the Internet’s roots in the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which financed those interface message processors, and that emphasizes the importance of academic computing in the 1970s and 1980s, before a commercial boom aided by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the World Wide Web in 1989. The usual history of the Internet begins with this diagram. Those four machines, the dedicated long-distance phone lines connecting them to one another, and the “interface message processors”-computers dedicated to the task of routing information across the network-represented the entirety of the Internet in 1969. The circles represent four institutions- UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, the University of Utah, and the Stanford Research Institute-while the boxes represent giant mainframe computers on their campuses. It was drawn in December 1969 and features four circles, four boxes, and four lines. There’s a diagram of the Internet that I show my students every semester. The welcome screen, created by Jim Lane, for ‘The Antenna Farm,’ a bulletin-board system (BBS) run by the early BBS designer Ben Thornton
