Internet History, Technology, and Security
https://www.coursera.org/learn/internet-history/
Charles Severance put together a college class called "Internet History, Technology, and Security". He's an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. And in the mid-1990s, he was the host of Internet:TCI, a national television talk show about the Internet that ran for several years on the TCI cable system.
This course has been offered on Coursera for a while now, but recently, they made it on-demand — meaning you can take the class anytime. You don't have to wait for a semester to start.
As a college course, you can complete assignments, take quizzes, and pay to get a certificate. But that's not why I'm posting this link. The amazing thing is the videos. He's collected a set of videos that explain and document where the web came from better than any other source I've found.
For example, under Section 4. History: The Web Makes it Easy to Use, there's a video of an interview with Robert Cailliau — from 1999. Honestly, cable access TV shows are emerging as one of the best documentation formats for capturing the history of what happened. How can you do better than an interview with the co-inventor of the web just a few years after they created it? (Plus, TV recordings of screens, showing early websites running on old hardware with slow connections — it's some of the most accurate ways to recapture what the early web was like.)
Check it out. Watch some or all of the videos. You have to sign-in to "take the class" — but the whole thing is free (if you don't care about getting a certificate).
Or if you'd like, just watch the videos on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRFEj9H3Oj6-srSAgLb-ZGVNGlo3v14X
April 22, 2015 - 6:32pm