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Complete History of The Internet & The Web

* Miss Universe [PersonRank 7]

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
16 years ago2,608 views

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/internet200807?printable=true&currentPage=all

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/04/the-history-of-the-internet-is-being-written-byvanity-fair/

Ianf [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

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. [...]"
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/internet200807?printable=true&currentPage=all

[ 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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