How the Web Was Won

I haven’t read through the whole (dorkily named) article, but I’m blogging it so I can find it later when I update the “Writing for the Internet” course I’ll be teaching this fall. I try to include at least a little history, since most students are surprised to learn the internet is about as old as I am. Vanity Fair:

Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough–network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser–inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology.