Whenever I say that the Hyperlink changed the world, people look at me like “huh?” The lowly hyperlink is often overlooked as just a ‘feature’ of the Internet or the Web in particular. But I’ve always thought that was a bit backwards. The hyperlink is what made the web possible — it is for the [...]

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Everybody’s linking to this article today, but I had to share a chunk of it that gave me goosebumps. It’s this bit from Leonard Kleinrock:
: September 2, 1969, is when the first I.M.P. was connected to the first host, and that happened at U.C.L.A. We didn’t even have a camera or a tape recorder or [...]

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The granddaddy of the Internet clarifies a popular misconception.
Print What I’ve Learned: Vint Cerf
Al Gore had seen what happened with the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, which his father introduced as a military bill. It was very powerful. Housing went up, suburban boom happened, everybody became mobile. Al was attuned to [...]

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Boing Boing has a lovely paean saying Happy birthday, Carl Linnaeus, to the one responsible for bringing a common vocabulary (and, maybe most importantly, a system of naming) to natural science — one of the cornerstones that has helped human beings (*ahem* … “homo sapiens”) to share and codify scientific learning.
He’s, of course, a [...]

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I love this quote. When asked if Web 1.0 was about connecting computers, while Web 2.0 is about connecting people, Webfather Tim Berners-Lee said,
“Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. [...]

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I really loved the idea of glass being a liquid that was just moving ’super slow.’ I first heard it from a tour guide or two in an old building somewhere, and I could swear my chemistry teacher once mentioned it. But, alas, it is not the case:
Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Fact [...]

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This is truly astounding. It bends the mind in a Philip K Dick-like way … I realized that advertising and mass media were powerful, but when you see concrete examples like this, it’s disturbing.
This is an article from 1982 in the Atlantic Monthly that explains why, even with the glut of diamonds from South [...]

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I almost missed the chance to wish Benjamin Franklin happy birthday. 300 years young.
I had no idea how important the guy was, or how influential and famous he was in his own day, until I recently read several books about the revolutionary generation (Founding Brothers, etc.). Or, I should say, I knew he was very [...]

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