The Webby Awards was founded way back when no one knew if the web would take off. When we take a look at the Webbys, we see the web’s history.

This post starts with a book. This book: It’s called Jargon: An Informal Dictionary of Computer Terms. That’s my copy. It’s a book I stumbled on while researching this topic, and one I’ve come to truly love for a variety of reasons, not the least of which because it’s written by Robin Williams who may but […]

You are reading this somewhere. On your laptop or on your phone or in your email or RSS reader. If you’re reading this on the web, then this page was delivered from my server to you via a protocol called HTTP. There’s all sorts of fascinating things I can say about HTTP, but the important […]

Web communities started small, and many began with purpose. They radiated out from a single source, spread through close-knit circles and pre-viral word of mouth. We may have large social network behemoths that loom over the landscape and dominate the market these days, but they are a far more uniform and manufactured experience, one that’s […]

In 1995, Netscape Navigator was enjoying a meteoric rise to the top of the browser market. They had only released the first version of their browser a year prior, but already it was a crowd favorite and was bolstering the growing popularity of the web. But employees at Netscape were constantly looking over their shoulder, knowing full […]

In an interview for her book Internet Art in 2004, writer Rachel Greene had this to say about why she felt the subject of her book was so important: I refuse to let commercial interests dominate the history and perception of the net because I think they would exclude the most important and dynamic internal content […]

In Chapter 2 of what I’m calling my complete history, I traced one of the most massive shifts in the history of the web to 1995, a transformative year, it turns out, not just for technology but for the United States generally. A year that, incidentally, also included the trial of O.J. Simpson. To say […]

I talked a bit about the importance of the WWW Wizards Workshop last time in my recap on the importance of 1995, but there was another essential element of that meeting I glossed over a bit. In July of 1993, a few dozen developers huddled together at the O’Reilly offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They had […]