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A long, tedious, US-centric and pretty shallow "history," with highly-idosyncratic choice of participants, some of whom know no limits to their own auto-promotion (on the other hand, isn't that the essence of Vanity Fair – the concept, if not the magazine? [disclosure: of which I am long-time paid subscriber].) We shall never know it, but I suspect that Tim Berners-Lee, whom VF must've contacted, declined to be interviewed out of modesty....
That said, there are some hitherto-unknown gems there: how about this early "business model from hell" of Amazon.com's, disclosed by Jeff Bezos himself:
"[...] One of my friends figured out that you could order a negative quantity of books. And we would credit your credit card and then, I guess, wait for you to deliver the books to us. We fixed that one very quickly. [...]"
vanityfair.com/culture/feature ...
[ Incidentially, in the referenced TechCrunch article Mike Arrington reviews not the longish VF story itself --he must've been too busy to read it-- but the slideshow of pictures of the subset (of the subset) of there-mentioned early Internet pioneers. Subsequently, the comments/refutations below are much more interesting, than the text they discuss.]
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