Internet 50th Anniversary

50 years ago today, a few students crowded into a narrow room at the University of California, Los Angeles. They were going to send a message to Stanford, more than 200 miles away, through telephone lines. Their first message was "login". They typed an L, and then an O--, and then, as would happen many times in the history of the Internet, it crashed.

And as happened many times more in the history of the Internet, they spent an hour fixing the code, and tried again. This time they succeeded.

The sprightly young folks that were in this room that chilly October night are old or dead now, as are most of the others that planted the tree whose shade they would never sit in. They need no praise, for the greatest praise an inventor needs is the use of his invention.

Half a century of history followed--an age that allowed for the development of, drove many people towards using, and towards the end was increasingly shaped by the Internet. The struggle between government, corporation, and populace is as storied as the history of every political struggle anywhere. There have been some triumphs for us: there is a reason the Microsoft "Network" is just a plain site, after all, but the increasing centralization of the Internet cannot be denied.

Every forum, every IRC network, every imageboard, is an epic by itself, entertaining and reflective of the social attitudes and economic conditions of its time. How did you discover the Internet? What do you use it for? What do you want from the Internet? Think about it for a minute, and imagine that there are three billion stories just like yours, the vast majority of which have already glided in silence into the great beyond of obscurity. Let's record these stories before we ourselves have followed.

Welcome to Bibliotheca Anonoma's Special Exhibit for the 50th Anniversary of the Internet. Rest your tired legs here, traveler, and clear your mind of the "drama" that may be afflicting you elsewhere. Read about where the Internet's been before, where it's going, and--who knows?--maybe take away a few tips for how to run your own community.

• Internet 50th Anniversary/ARPANET in the Congressional Record - A brief survey of the proceedings of the highest legislative body in the home of the Internet about it.
• Internet 50th Anniversary/Brief History of the Anon Subculture - How we got here, from 1969 to the present.
• Internet 50th Anniversary/Biography of John Perry Barlow - Internet pioneer, rancher, and "cyberlibertarian".