Jacob Bruggeman: Obviously, many people have written about the Internet, and I imagine you’ve read many of them. When do histories of the Internet typically begin, and what do you think the most common among starting points miss?
Kevin riscoll: Depending on who you ask, you might hear about early ARPANET connections in 1969, or about a bread van kitted out with electronics driving around the Bay Area in 1977, or about the ARPANET’s official adoption of the Internet protocols in 1983, or maybe even the privatization of the National Science Foundation–funded “backbone” in the early 1990s. If you look up “history of the Internet” on Google or Wikipedia, these are the stories you tend to find.
And yet, despite disagreeing about the start date, these stories [all] tell a rather narrow version of Internet history. They each call back to the same family of experimental networks funded by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency: an office within the Department of Defense. This history is not wrong, but it is limited in its explanatory power. It can tell us about the protocols and policies that made the Internet of 1995 possible, but it can’t tell us how the Internet became a medium for everyday life.
To understand the popularization of the Internet, we need to look beyond Silicon Valley tech firms and US research institutions. The Internet that we use today grew out of countless pre-existing systems coming together. These pre-Internet networks included amateur bulletin boards, commercial telecom services, public data networks, and private e-mail providers. It was this process of convergence that made the Internet a “network of networks.”
JB: As you mention, your book recovers a history of communities built on electronic bulletin board systems—what you call “the modem world.” What was the modem world? Can you introduce us to some of the people who inhabited it and explain how it was created?
KD: The “modem world” refers to the universe of dial-up bulletin boards and online services that began in the late 1970s and flourished for nearly two decades. Initially, very few people had ever used a computer and hardly anyone owned a computer of their own. At universities and other large institutions, computing involved sharing access to a single powerful machine. Meanwhile, a growing number of electronics enthusiasts were rallying around DIY kits and early PCs. Computer clubs and magazines began to spring up around the US. This hobbyist community created the first grassroots bulletin board systems by connecting home-brewed machines to the telephone network.