The Internet has fundamentally changed the
way we conduct business, research, and education. Its development and diffusion
was one of the most significant technical achievements of the late 20th
century. The history of the ARPANET, the research network that was the genesis
of today's Internet, has been told in many popular books and articles. However,
the transition in the 1980's from a specialized research network with few
hundred hosts to a general purpose network infrastructure with millions of
hosts able to support a wide range of advanced applications, is neither
well-documented nor well-understood-despite the fact that it spawned a
multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry.
The Internet History Archive has two
objectives:
- Generate new historical material through
the collection of commentaries that include participant’s stories,
observations, perspectives, and memories.
These commentaries will be obtained through on online
contributions, individual and group oral histories, and a symposium that
will bring together the key participants to discuss, evaluate, and record
their respective roles.
- Create a digital archive of source
materials about the creation and evolution of the Internet. The archive
will collect and make available relevant existing documents of the era
from the federal agencies, corporations, academic institutions, and
individuals that worked together to create the Internet.
The resulting archive will be an invaluable
resource for current and future scholars and analysts seeking to understand the
evolution of the network and associated computing technology, the role and
impact of federal programs and the academic environment, and the factors that
made this historic partnership of academia, industry and government so strikingly
successful.
The project has a degree of urgency. Becuase of the highly distributed nature of the Internet many of the physical records from the period are in the possession of individuals and are being discarded. Additionally, with the passage of time participant's memories are fading and being lost.
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