Where Did the Internet Really Come From?

Where did the internet come from? When students are asked that by an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, some mention ARPANET or Silicon Valley — and "no fewer than four students have simply written, 'Bill Gates....'"

Kevin Driscoll argues that the internet hasn't existed since 1994 and that it's the intersection of hundreds of regional, national, and cooperative networks. A mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks have evolved into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general public.

The modem world was driven by community-oriented amateurs and entrepreneurs, unlike ARPANET, which was created by researchers. These were separate spheres of social and technical activity despite their shared interest in computer networking. The bulletin board system was the most popular type of PC networking. Few people were expert users of both the ARPANET family of networks and the consumer orientedBBS networks. The institutions of power overlookedBBSs. The World Wide Web became the public face of cyberspace. The internet's future is being promoted by journalists on television and in print. Investment capital flooded the industry. Money and attention went to firms connected to the Web. When a moral panic over "cyberporn" threatened to break the dot-com bubble,BBSs provided a scapegoat. The Web was new, clean and safe to use. The operators quietly changed their names to avoid being stigmatized. Thousands of dial-upBBSs were replaced by internet service providers. The term was no longer used in the US. Millions of others would follow in the footsteps of the people who built the modem world in the 1980s. Along with writing code and running up their phone bills, the operators of theBBS developed novel forms of community moderation. The experience of grassroots networking was carried into the social Web by formerBBS users. The social and technical innovations of theBBS community have been reproduced by many social media platforms. Forgetting has a lot of consequences. The stories we tell about the origin of the internet are more important than ever. Recovering the history of the modem world can help us imagine a world beyond commercial social media, mass surveillance, and platform monopolies. EachBBS was a glimpse of the future written in code and accessible from your local phone jack. The internet seems strange again because we're in this period of experimentation. We can change our expectations for the internet's future by remembering its past.